


no grave can hold my body down

by OpheliaMarina



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-30 20:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 70,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5178515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpheliaMarina/pseuds/OpheliaMarina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter what Rachel says, the Goddess of Arcadia Bay might be all-knowing, but she can't be all-loving. Chloe's certain no goddess has ever cared about her. </p>
<p>(Canon Divergence - Sacrifice Max.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Tiếng Việt available: [không ngôi mộ nào chôn được xác tôi](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11732190) by [TheGreyLoner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGreyLoner/pseuds/TheGreyLoner)



> Much thanks to Haaku, Bri, and Kaelin for beta'ing!

Arcadia Bay is a quiet, boring hick town in which nothing happens, and no one knows it better than Chloe. Weird occultist shit just isn't its style, and it never has been.

The cult of the goddess, then, takes everyone by surprise. 

The first time Chloe sees them, they're hardly a cult at all. It's just two girls sitting in the Two Whales on a Monday morning, which makes them identical to basically anyone at all. They're talking quietly but intensely, the way serious girls do, and the girl with her hair all swept up in a bun is bent over the table, sketching. Chloe doesn’t even realize the other girl is Rachel until she’s come up to take their order. 

“Whoa, hey, good morning,” she says, setting the coffee pot down and putting her hand on her hip. “And, uh, hi Kate. What’s up?”

Rachel smiles sunnily up at her, tossing her hair over one shoulder and leaning forward on her elbows. “Morning, angel. Just grabbing a bite before class. Bacon shortage hit Arcadia yet or is the regular good?”

“Uh huh,” Chloe says, slow and skeptical, then yells over her shoulder, “Joyce! Rachel and Kate Marsh!”

There’s an affirmatory yell from the griddle, and Chloe turns back to the girls. Kate has stopped sketching and is leaning forward so her forearm is blocking the pad, looking more apprehensive than usual, her gaze flickering between Rachel and Chloe uncertainly. Rachel just keeps smiling guilelessly up at her.

Deciding to cut right to the chase, Chloe reaches for their coffee mugs, starts pouring, and says, “So, is this some kind of study session? Or have you found yourself a new best friend?”

Kate sits up straight, looking guilty, but Rachel just laughs, tilting back in her seat. “Don’t be jealous, babe. Kate and I just realized we have something in common and wanted to have a chat, that’s all.”

As far as Chloe knows, the sum of what Kate Marsh and Rachel Amber have in common is exactly zero. “And that something is… you’re both blonde?”

Kate giggles a little at that, and Chloe smiles jauntily at her. She doesn’t have anything against Kate Marsh, of course not, Kate is the sweetest person at Blackwell. Chloe’s just not entirely getting why she’s here at the diner early on a Monday with Rachel, of all people. 

As if reading her mind, Rachel looks between the two of them, thoughtfully, then says, “Actually, Chloe, maybe you can help us out. The thing is, Kate and I both keep seeing these symbols- Kate, could you show her? Would you mind?”

After a cautious glance at Chloe, Kate slides her sketchbook towards the edge of the table, a little shy. “They’re not that great, but-”

“Oh, hush,” Rachel says as Chloe bends down to look, hastily lifting up the coffee pot to prevent spilling on the page. Kate blushes and tugs at a loose lock of her hair, and Chloe shoots an absentminded smile in her direction before gazing downwards.

There are four distinct figures spread across the page, in surprising detail for pencil and paper- a deer, a butterfly, a Polaroid camera, and a swirling mass that maybe looks like a tornado. She frowns at them, balancing the pot in her left hand.

After five years of friendship, Chloe’s become accustomed to feeling when Rachel is looking at her intently rather than seeing her do it. “Chloe, are any of these familiar to you?”

Chloe frowns at it some more, glances between the two earnest-looking girls, then shrugs. “No?”

Both Kate and Rachel sigh, falling back against the booth, and Chloe straightens up, hand back on her hip and regripping the coffee pot with her other hand. “I mean, the camera looks kinda like my dad’s old one? But that’s where the resemblance stops. What does it matter?”

Rachel shrugs with one shoulder, looking despondent. “I’ve been seeing those things for _weeks_ ,” she says. “You’re sure you’ve never seen any of these things, Chlo? Ever dreamed about them, maybe?”

There’s a beat of silence.

“Excuse me?” Chloe says, blinking slowly. “ _Dreamed_ about them?”

She’s spared what would surely be a nonsensical response by Joyce’s shout of, “Chloe! Order up!” and has to give the girls a short gesture of be-right-back before scuttling to the griddle.

Passing two plates to her over the counter, Joyce leans forward with one elbow, spatula in the air, to eye Chloe cynically. “Don’t forget that your shift don’t end just because Rachel’s here.”

Rolling her eyes, Chloe scoops up both plates onto her forearms and nods. “Yeah, yeah.”

Joyce straightens up and pokes her in the nose with the spatula fondly, and as Chloe wrinkles her nose and splutters, she goes on, “Now hold up. Did you mean to say that Rachel and Kate Marsh are here together?” Chloe nods again, a little disgruntled, and she frowns. “Whatever for?”

“That’s what I’m working on, Mom,” Chloe says, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one,” and she moves back towards the booth, laying the two plates down to put her hands back on her hips. “So, sorry. You were talking about some new age bullshit?”

Kate is twirling her pencil absently between her fingers, and when Chloe says ‘new age’, she drops it. But to Chloe’s surprise, she doesn’t immediately come to her own defense, or lets Rachel come to it. Instead, she just taps the page twice with her fingernail.

“I’ve been seeing these things for a while now,” Kate murmurs. “Mostly in dreams, but… I get flashes during the day too. I’ve been seeing this deer in real life, and sometimes when I look at something bright, it’s like there’s a camera behind… I don’t really know how to explain it.” She looks up at Chloe, in a way that seems almost pleading. “At first I thought it was God trying to tell me something, but I think it’s something else. I think there’s something else, here. You’ve never felt it?”

As if Chloe’s supposed to be able to tell one god from another, or interpret what some bullshit signs mean. Then again, she’s pretty sure psychics get paid better than waitresses, so she keeps her mouth shut and looks to Rachel again.

She’d been looking at Kate too, eyes narrow with focus, and now when Chloe’s gaze lands on her, she goes back to looking at the sketches, drawing the book towards her and tracing one hand over the picture of the deer. “I’ve seen this deer ever since I was little,” she says, slowly. “I’ve told you that, Chloe.”

Rachel’s always bought into spiritual nonsense better than Chloe has- Chloe blames it mostly on Blackwell’s weird janitor, all his talk about spirit animals and the town being alive- but this is really taking the cake. “You told me that you _liked_ deer, that’s not the same thing!”

“Oh, is that what I said?” Rachel says distractedly, tracing one finger over the butterfly’s wings now. “My bad. Anyway, it’s like Kate said, it’s not just that anymore. The butterfly and the camera, I see them sometimes too, in real life and dreams. I keep dreaming about this tornado hitting the town, I have been for months, and if Kate’s having the same one then it’s not just a nightmare, it’s a sign. There’s something out there, Chloe.”

Here’s the thing. Chloe knows Rachel. Maybe not inside and out, but she’s sure that she understands Rachel better than anyone else in the world does. And yeah, there are times when she’s seen Rachel’s eyes wander, seen her expression grow dreamy and strange, and Chloe had always wondered what she was thinking about but never asked. Part of what made Rachel Amber _Rachel Amber_ was that she was mysterious, and Chloe liked that about her, knew it wasn’t her place to take that away.

But this is different. There’s a light in Rachel’s gaze Chloe’s never seen before, a fierce determination that makes her shiver a little. Hesitating for just a second, Chloe reaches forward to take her empty mug. “Come on. What’s out there? Out where, anyway?”

Kate and Rachel glance at each other again, and Chloe’s beginning to hate this, hating this feeling of being on the outside when she’s standing right here. Then Rachel looks back at her. “I don’t know yet,” she says. “But I’m going to figure it out. You’ll help us out, right Chloe?”

Just like Rachel- no is never an answer. Still, she’s never roped Chloe into bullshit this weird before. This is on a whole other level from trying LSD once at a party. “I mean. How the fuck am I supposed to help you? I just said I’ve never seen any of that shit before.”

“That doesn’t mean you won’t,” Rachel says patiently. “Besides, everyone who lives in this shithole comes by the diner eventually, right? Ask around for people who’ve seen the deer or something. I’m willing to bet Kate and I aren’t the only ones this is happening to.”

Chloe gives it a full second, but Rachel just keeps looking up at her, dead serious and tirelessly earnest. She opens her mouth, closes it, then tries again. “Okay... okay. Kate, no offense, but Rachel full offense- you guys are out of your minds.”

Looking away to poke at the eggs with her fork, Kate bites her lip, but Rachel just smiles up at Chloe again, this time with a note of challenge to it. “Think whatever you want, sweetheart,” she says, “but this is gonna be big. I can feel it.”

Before Chloe has time to think of a good retort, Joyce’s voice sounds from the counter again. “Chloe! What did I say!”

Muttering, “fuck,” Chloe quickly refills Rachel’s mug and sets it back down. “Whatever, I gotta go. Listen, if you guys start fucking with a Ouiji board or something, call me, all right? I wanna be there if shit gets really freaky.”

Rachel just smiles her slow smile again, hand settling around the mug’s handle. “You got it. I’ll text you after class, try to sneak out so we can go to the beach.”

It’s not really sneaking out if Joyce expects her to do it, but Chloe nods anyway, gives the two girls a brief salute, and heads back to the counter. Joyce hands her three more plates, looking more amused than chastising. “So what drama does Rachel have cooking up now, pray tell?”

Even with three plates stacked up on her arms, Chloe still manages to shrug helplessly. “She’s crazy, Mom.”

Joyce just chuckles, and turns back to the burner. “Oh, honey, I could’ve told you that.”

\---

Five months later, and this truth still stands- Rachel is always right.

The cult of the goddess isn’t the second coming of Scientology or anything like that, but it’s getting a good number of people in the country interested in Arcadia Bay. In the end, it seems like bizarre shit and pretty girls will bring people anywhere.

The girls who run it still don’t have much to their name, besides an abandoned warehouse that serves as some kind of church, a shoddy collection of drawings and dream journals that constitute a holy text, and a two-minute news clip on NBC Nightly from a few weeks ago. But town-wise, it’s the biggest thing to have happened in ages. Once the Good Word starting spreading, half of Arcadia Bay started coming clean about dreaming about tornados, seeing deer (because that’s so fucking weird, out here in the middle of goddamn _nature_ ), seeing signs. Besides that, almost every girl Chloe knows from Blackwell is part of the cult’s hierarchy now- of _priestesses_ and _acolytes_ and all this old-sounding shit Chloe can’t wrap her brain around. 

And Rachel’s their leader. Their head priestess, she says. And now she’s always busy, nearly too busy for Chloe, and even when they’re together, she’s always distracted, drawing lines in the sand, eyes flitting to somewhere Chloe can’t see, can’t be. 

Chloe doesn’t ask her about the goddess, because she doesn’t care, she doesn’t, she won’t let dreams take more of Rachel from her than they already have. So when they’re together, Chloe doesn’t ask, Rachel doesn’t tell. 

So because Rachel doesn’t tell, this is all the concrete knowledge Chloe has about the goddess: she’s a deer, or a girl, or a storm, or something else bizarre; she has a preference for girls, which Chloe doesn’t necessarily condemn her for; there’s a ninety percent chance she isn’t real, and Chloe hates her anyway, for taking Rachel away from her. 

At least she’s good for business.

A lot of people come in for the goddess, anyway, and they all need to eat. Before, Arcadia Bay never saw many new faces, but now there’s always someone from Washington or Nevada here to scope out Religion’s Next Big Thing. 

It’s the middle of the afternoon, and Rachel’s still in class so Chloe’s at the diner, working, when Joyce pokes her in the shoulder. “Got a leftside booth for you, Chloe.”

Chloe finishes stacking the plates next to the washing machine and peers over her shoulder. It’s a teenage girl, alone in the booth, but probably not from Blackwell- school day’s in full swing, and any art student Chloe knows never skips out on photography class. 

“Chloe,” Joyce repeats, and Chloe shrugs, grabs the pad from her apron and heads over. The girl looks up, and she’s mostly in shadow but Chloe catches a hint of her face- angular but soft-expressioned, pretty in a quiet sort of way. Her hair is ruffled, like she’s just woken up from a long nap, and a thin brown. 

“Hi, I’m Chloe,” she says, automatic, “welcome to the Two Whales, can I offer you some coffee?”

The girl just stares at her. The shine of her eyes is barely tangible in the sun’s cast against her, but from what Chloe can tell, she just looks stunned, like someone’s hit her or something. Normally Chloe would be flattered, but the way the girl looks- it’s kind of unsettling. “Um. Coffee?”

That snaps the girl out of it, and she sits up straight, nodding awkwardly. “Oh, yeah. Please.”

A little relieved, Chloe sets down a mug and pours, and the girl leans back in the booth, watching her hand tilt. There’s a strange focus to her gaze that makes Chloe feel odd, not uncomfortable but rather out of place.

She has to make some sort of conversational topic, if just to get a handle on the girl. 

Chloe hands her a menu and says, offhandedly, "You here about the goddess?" 

Mousy Brown blinks a little, then smiles wryly. "Depends what kind of goddess we're talking about." 

Good question. What the hell kind of classifications do deities have anyway? It's not like Chloe would know in the first place, Joyce never brought her to church. "Is there any other kind? The Goddess. All-powerful, all-knowing, likes animals and tooling around Arcadia for some reason." 

For a moment, the girl's expression flickers, from neutral geniality to an emotion too quiet for Chloe to recognize. Then she chuckles. "A goddess, okay. Don't tell me you believe in that shit."

Until this moment Chloe's never even thought about how her own belief factors into the grand scheme of things. Now, she smoothly deflects. "Well, you know, it's quite the rage around here so I wouldn't talk too loud if I were you." 

"Huh," the girl says, as she leans back into the booth. "A goddess cult in Arcadia. I never would've thought." 

Sitting in the sunlight, it's even harder for Chloe to get a good look at her. She's translucently pale, washed out by the light, and when Chloe looks down at her the girl's eyes are still in shadow. "Are you from around here? Past or present?" 

For some reason, the girl chuckles, low in her throat. "Past," she says, "I used to live here," and now she looks out the window. Maybe she's nostalgic or maybe she's bitter; either way, Chloe can't see her face. "I'm just visiting."

Chloe presses the menu closer to her chest, reaching for her attention again. "And the Arcadia Bay in your past wasn't a creepy witch town?"

At that, the girl laughs. She has a nice, sweet laugh, and the sound of it makes Chloe simultaneously smile and feel a mysterious pang in the center of her chest. "Oh no, it definitely was," she says. "Just not as eager to support... female figures." 

"Well," Chloe says, flipping her pad to a fresh page, "in that case, you actually might like the change. The girls who do the whole goddess club thing will be here soon, you should meet 'em. Their ringleader, Rachel-" And she can't help it, she starts smiling, like a fool. "She's something." 

When she looks back at the girl, she looks so indescribably sad. Her gaze is far away, like she's miles and years away from the café, from Chloe. 

Then the expression's gone. She smiles up at Chloe, eyes scrunched against the light. "I'd love to meet Rachel," she says, and the break in her voice could be natural, but she's been acting fucking weird this whole time so probably not. "I'd love to. But first, uh- pancakes?"

"Coming right up," Chloe says, and pretends to write on the pad so she can look at the girl some more. Her eyes are gone again, on the lighthouse, but the profile of her face is like a painting, rays of sun painting over her cheeks. "What's your name, by the way? I said before, but I'm Chloe." 

That startles the girl back into reality, and she stares at Chloe just long enough to be uncomfortable before breaking into a soft smile. "Max," she says. "I'm Max."

There’s a strange flash of - _something_ , in Chloe’s head, when she says so. Not like a camera, like Kate used to say, but of something else, like deja vu. Then she snaps out of it, looks back into Max’s expectant face.

“Max,” she repeats. “Cool. Be right back.” 

Professed Max smiles wanly up at her, and for a moment Chloe thinks she might say something else. Her eyes focus on Chloe’s, then just beyond her on Joyce, and she looks troubled, but in the end she just says, “Thanks, Chloe.”

As she’s waiting on Joyce, Chloe finds herself looking back at her- all the booths are empty except for Max’s, after all, and she’s easily a nicer sight than any of the truckers at the counter.

It’s not the fact that she’s pretty that has Chloe hung up, though. There’s something else to it. The way she crosses her legs, the way she keeps looking out the window to the lighthouse, the way she glances over at Chloe, curious, and immediately looks away, shy. 

It feels like she’s been here before. 

There’s a sharp jolt in Chloe’s head, and she winces and looks away just as Joyce calls, “Order up!”

But when Chloe takes the plate and crosses back to Max’s booth, she’s not there anymore. Instead, it’s Rachel, backpack straps looped around her crossed ankles and tapping a toe methodically against the table. 

Chloe comes to a stop in front of her, raising an eyebrow. “You kick that poor girl out of her seat?” 

“Hi to you too,” Rachel says, grinning before her brow furrows. “What girl?”

After a furtive look around, it does seem that Max has left the premises, but. “The girl that was just here, she was sitting there literally a second ago. You didn’t see her?”

Rachel frowns, then shrugs. “Nope. She must’ve gone out the window or something.” She looks to the pancakes and grins. “You get dine and dashed, then? You and Joyce had a pretty good run going for a while there.”

“Well, she did dash but she didn’t dine,” Chloe says, sliding into the booth opposite her and laying out the pancakes, “so these are ours now. How was class?”

Grinning, Rachel reaches for her knife and fork. “Kinda boring. We’re doing nature shots now, not really my speed. Let’s talk about something more interesting. I have a proposition for you.”

If Chloe’s stomach goes into her throat, that’s her business. “A proposition? Holy shit, Rach, it’s three in the afternoon.”

Rolling her eyes and grinning, Rachel stabs the dough with her fork and tears some away. “Not that kind of proposition, you wish you were that lucky. Anyway, I wanted to ask you to come help me out at the warehouse today.”

“Ew,” Chloe says, stomach settling back into place, “why.”

“Because you’re my best friend and I’m asking you to,” Rachel says easily, biting off the pancake. Swallowing, she continues, “Besides, I want you to check out the church. It’d be cool if you were involved. We’d get to spend more time together, and I really think it could, you know, open your mind.”

Chloe scoffs, reaching for her own fork. “I’m already open minded,” she says, “and I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not into that voodoo shit.”

“Just give it a try,” Rachel says insistently, knocking Chloe’s fork out of the way to get to the more syrupy bits. “You never know. Chloe,” she says, and now she’s giving Chloe her look, the one under the eyelashes, the one that always gets Chloe to do whatever she wants. “It would mean a lot to me, okay?”

Well, fuck. “Fine,” Chloe says sullenly, and tears off her own piece of pancake, shoving it in her mouth. “Fine, I’ll come. But I’m telling you, the goddess or whatever, and me, I can guarantee there’s no connection there.”

Rachel just grins, in satisfaction, and extends her own pancake-stabbed fork in Chloe’s direction to give her a bite. “We’ll see.”


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again to the yelling squad (Bri, Haaku, Kaelin) for beta'ing!!

The warehouse smells like dead fish and a desperate, evergreen attempt to make it not smell like dead fish, and Chloe hates it immediately. 

Rachel sees her wrinkle her nose when they walk in, and nods in solidarity, wrinkling her own. “Yeah, I know. We’re working on it. Probably going to start burning incense next week.”

“Yeah, that’ll fix the problem,” Chloe says, and leans into the hand Rachel punches her in the side with, lets the pressure force her forward because she’s certainly not going on her own two legs.

Other than the smell, the warehouse isn’t too bad. It’s spacious, at least, and there are three large gaps in the wall that function as makeshift windows. There’s no pews or benches or anything congregation-style, like Chloe had expected; instead, the room is mostly made up of little table shrines of words and pictures, spaced out exhibit-like across the room, glittering faint and mystical with candlelight. Girls are milling about the room from table to white-clothed table, conversing animatedly with one another, rifling through the papers, or writing in a journal. 

They don’t all have the same blank, Stepford-Wives look on their face like Chloe had expected, and they’re all just dressed in their school clothes, which means some are distinctly holier-looking than others. In fact, there’s very little cohesion to all of the girls as a whole; the only thing that marks their shared devotion is a little blue pin in their shirts and the fact that they’re all in a dank warehouse on a Friday afternoon. 

When Chloe turns to face Rachel again, she sees the pin on Rachel’s own lapel, previously small enough to be insignificant. She squints at it, and it takes form as a small, spread-winged blue butterfly. 

Rachel notices her looking. “Cute, right? You want one?”

The image of the butterfly- the blue- evokes a weird wave of nausea in Chloe, and she leans back from it. If it’s just from the brightness of the color or from what it represents (and what does it even represent? she thought the goddess was a deer), Chloe doesn’t know. So she just shakes her head. “No, thanks. Besides, do you have the funds to be doing handouts yet?”

Humming, Rachel just adjusts her own pin. “Not handouts, babe. They distinguish the Goddess followers from the general rabble, for when we do tours and shit. And Kate made them free of charge, so it’s no cash out of our pocket. You sure you don’t want one? It’s a pretty prestigious symbol around town.”

“No,” Chloe says, more sharply this time, and looks around. A couple of girls have caught sight of her now, are looking at her a little strange. “What do you even want me here for?”

For a moment, Rachel seems to consider. Then she claps her hands. “Oh, okay, idea. Listen, I’m gonna jet to the back room for a little bit, I need to go through the premonition box-”

Chloe blinks as slow as she can manage. “Premonition box?”

“Yeah, it’s this anonymous thing we have going on for the town,” Rachel says, purposefully ignoring Chloe’s incredulous look, “where we have a box in front of the door, for people who think they might’ve had visions or dreams through the goddess. Or about her.” She rolls her eyes. “Most of it’s junk, you wouldn’t believe how many are just like ‘I had a dream the goddess sucked my dick’ or ‘the goddess said Dana Ward should go out with me’-” When Chloe bursts out laughing, she giggles too, a little grudgingly. “Okay, actually it’s not so hard to believe. But sometimes they’re pretty legit. It’s helping us map out the logistics of the storm, at least, that’s the most common vision for people.”

This storm thing bugs Chloe, not just in the casually-talking-about-a-tornado way it would most people but also in this niggling way in the back of her head. Still, she won’t ask about it, because that’ll just wrap her up in this goddess bullshit way more than she wants to be. “So, again, what are you making me do?”

At least Rachel still looks fond when she flips Chloe off. Chloe whistles. “Whoa, Miss High Priestess. Is this really the place for such blasphemy?”

“It’s head priestess,” Rachel says, deflecting the question, and glides slightly to the left to unhook what must be the so-called premonition box from the wall. “Anyway, what I’m asking you to do is, while I’m busy, ask around. Ask the girls what happened here while I was off visiting your rude ass.”

Chloe follows her forward another three paces before stopping in her tracks. “Excuse me?” she says. “You’re just going to leave me out here with a bunch of fucking Joan of Arcs?”

Long-suffering, Rachel turns on her heel outside the supply room door and gives Chloe a look so Joyce-ish it’s shocking. “I’m not asking you to chop off your left foot or anything, Chlo. And I’ll be maybe fifteen minutes. Besides, it’s not like you don’t know any of them, they’re all just Blackwell girls. It’ll be just like you’d never dropped out of school.”

“Ha ha,” Chloe says dryly, and Rachel grins, and leans forward to peck her on the cheek. 

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she whispers, hot breath against Chloe’s cheek, “fifteen minutes,” and then she’s disappeared into the room and slammed the door behind her.

Chloe stands there in a daze for a full minute, so that’s at least one down. Fourteen to go. 

\---

After wandering around aimlessly for a good thirty seconds, Chloe decides Kate Marsh is the safest mark to chat up, and heads in her direction. Kate is quiet, which is good, and not pushy like the other girls can be, which is better. 

She’s by herself at one of the little white tables, drawing something detailed, when Chloe stops by her, but immediately looks up and smiles when she hears the footsteps pause. “Oh! Chloe, hi. What are you doing here?”

“I’m on a mission,” Chloe says solemnly, “a mission from God,” and grins when Kate giggles. Then she shrugs. “Actually, Rachel just dragged me along today. Now she’s having me do her rounds, but I have no fucking clue where to start.” She raises her eyebrows. “Do I just come out and ask you if you had any, what, visions today?”

Kate smiles good-naturedly and tucks some loose hair behind one ear. “Usually that’s how Rachel goes about it,” she admits. “But I haven’t really, not today. No dreams. No deer.”

Chloe’s not really listening, peering instead at the little pale book between her hands. “What’re you drawing?”

“Oh,” Kate says, and looks down at the sketch too. “I don’t know, really. I keep getting stuck on the same things when it comes to thinking about her.”

From what Chloe can see, Kate’s drawing looks like rain in an empty sky, birds frozen in suspended animation amongst graphite streaks of water. There’s no meaning there for her. “Like what?”

Tapping her eraser idly against the page, Kate says, “Like rain, and birds. I see the deer sometimes. More often than other people, but it doesn’t… lead me, like it does some of the other girls. It’s more of a comforting figure to me, I think.” A smile ghosts across her face. “It’s always there when I feel alone.”

There’s so many cryptic things said offhand in those few sentences that Chloe feels like this goddess thing is more of a Rubik’s cube than like the jigsaw puzzle Rachel’s been trying to make it out to be. She decides to start with, “What do you mean, it leads other people?”

At the question, Kate frowns a little in thought, then perks up and waves down another girl. Chloe does her best to not groan audibly. “I think- Dana! Could you-”

A tall, pretty cheerleader-type girl Chloe only vaguely recognizes comes gliding over, followed by Juliet Watson, who Chloe only knows because she’s the town’s biggest busybody, worse than any suburban mom. They’re both wearing the little blue butterfly pins over their hearts. The girl that must be Dana smiles prettily at the both of them, adjusting the tight ponytail at the back of her head. “What can I do for you, Kate?”

Kate just smiles back, looking between her and the now clearly uncomfortable Chloe, and lifts her hands in a welcoming, appeasing gesture. “Well, you know Chloe, Rachel’s friend-”

“Sure,” Dana says easily, smiling at her, as Juliet pipes up with, “Waitress at the Two Whales, yeah.”

Chloe scowls in her direction, but Kate just continues, “Yes, so. Chloe, this is Dana Ward, she’s one of our priestesses, and Juliet Ward, she’s an acolyte. And-”

“How do you decide that, anyway?” Chloe interrupts, looking between the three of them. “And how come Rachel is head priestess, if she and Kate formed this thing together?”

The three of them all look amongst each other, Juliet clearly itching to explain, and Dana sighs and waves her on. She bounces on the balls of her feet and turns to Chloe, bright-eyed.

“Okay, so,” she says. “Priestesses are girls whose connection to the goddess are, like, super strong. Rachel’s the head because her connection is by far the strongest, she has visions and dreams all the time, and besides that, she’s dedicated as hell. She is going to figure this shit out, you know? But Rachel, Dana, and Kate when she’s going incognito are the ones recognized as priestesses so far. We think they might even have the ability to communicate with her. And Victoria, well…”

Chloe misses that last part, because she’s turned to Kate to mouth “incognito?”

Looking a little guilty, Kate ducks her head. “I’m not officially recognized,” she says, “because I’m nervous my parents will find out about this. They’d see it as paganistic, you know, which it _isn’t_ , it’s more like...”

Her voice trails away, so Chloe has to prompt her into, “Like what?”

Kate blinks at her balefully, all soft hazel eyes and complacence. “Like a search for the truth,” she says simply. “Her truth.”

And that fits, that makes some sense in Chloe’s head for whatever bizarre reason, and she and Kate hold gazes for a moment before Juliet, sounding impatient, says, “Yeah, anyway. And so the acolytes, we take care of the shrines and help promote and organization-style stuff, while the priestesses do the heavy lifting things, running tours and dream interpretation and mapping out what the goddess meant by doing this, being that, et cetera. Acolytes don’t have that direct-ish connection, but still have occasional visions or think the goddess interacts with them somehow. Like, Alyssa-”

Amused and chiding, Dana says, “Hey, hey, let the girl tell her own story. Besides, Chloe, what was your question?”

All of this sounds like more homework to Chloe, but since this is a way to get information without encouraging Rachel, she’ll take the opportunity. Anyway, there’s only seven minutes left now. “Well, uh. I don’t know why Kate called you over, but. How come it’s a girls-only club?”

“The goddess doesn’t like boys,” all three girls say, at once, then glance at each other and giggle.

Chloe blinks at all of them, then gives a slightly nervous smile. “Okay, don’t act like that wasn’t creepy.”

“Sorry,” Kate says, and it’s the first time Chloe’s ever seen her roll her eyes, “we just have to say it all the time-”

“Boys keep wanting to join the club,” Juliet says confidentially. “Grown-ass men, too, in some cases. Claiming they have this connection with the goddess or whatever. But the thing is, for all of us real church girls, it’s pretty apparent the goddess is not into men.”

This is by far the wildest thing Chloe’s heard about the church so far, and she can’t help the grin cracking across her face. “So- wait, I’m sorry. Are you telling me you’ve all spent five months worshipping a lesbian goddess? I mean, you’re all pretty progressive, but this is kind of toeing the line of how far Arcadia Bay would be willing to support you guys.” 

“Well, that’s not necessarily what it means,” Juliet says matter-of-factly, but the fact that that’s the answer given tells Chloe it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Her grin stretches even wider. “But the deer doesn’t approach men, ever. And if guys do have legit dreams, they’re almost always one-off visions of the storm. None of them can ever sense her presence, either. So Rachel vetoed having guys join the church. That didn’t make a lot of people happy, but the fact is the goddess just doesn’t reach out to guys like she does girls.”

Dana frowns. “Yeah, there was one guy,” she says thoughtfully, “one guy who was like, really insistent we should let him in. And in fairness, he did have a couple of pretty detailed visions that seemed like the real deal. Said he felt really connected to the goddess or whatever. But the no-guys policy is pretty strict, Rachel made sure of that.” Then she giggles, conspiratorial and a little naughty. “And tee-bee-aych, I’d feel pretty sorry for the goddess if he were the mortal beloved!”

A couple of the girls, who have gathered curiously to bear witness to this conversation, laugh derisively, and Kate just smiles pityingly and says, “Come on, guys, Warren isn’t so bad,” but Chloe’s stuck, stuck on whatever was just said.

“Sorry, what?” she says. “The mortal what?” 

It takes a second to get someone’s attention, but Juliet is still reliable for info, so Chloe flags her down. “Oh, the mortal beloved? That’s Rachel’s theory, she’ll describe it better than we could. None of us can really feel it like she can.” Seeing Chloe look annoyed at the vaguery, she hurries to add, “Well, you know, sometimes we’ll get like, visions of the goddess with someone else and we have to assume that it might be the beloved. The person the goddess was in love with. But…” She sighs, defeated. “I don’t know. Ask Rachel.”

The whole point of this charade today is so Chloe doesn’t have to ask Rachel anything about this nonsense. So she decides to drop the beloved thing, steps back from the murmuring throng, and crosses her arms to check her watch.

Four minutes. The sun has set below the gapped windows, dousing the room in a gloomy dark orange light, and Chloe shoves her hands in her pockets, looking over to the door Rachel’s shut herself behind.

Kate sees her distraction, standing on her tiptoes to look over a chattering blonde’s shoulder, and her face falls. Taking Dana by the elbow, she approaches Chloe again, slow and unassuming as anything. “Chloe. I called Dana over so she could explain how the goddess led her.”

Dana rears back a little, like a startled horse, smiling automatically but with a shine of discomfort in her eyes. “Whoa, hey, Kate. That’s not a tour question.” But Kate fixes her with an encroaching look, and she just sighs, shrugging and turning to look at Chloe again. She hesitates just once more, and Chloe has to admit she’s intrigued now. “Uh, well. I think the goddess might have, uh, saved me from getting pregnant?”

This church is _outlandish_. If this kind of bullshit keeps piling up, Chloe’s going to end up more gleeful with this religion than annoyed. “Come again?”

Blushing a little, Dana shifts from one foot to the other. “Okay, I’m not going to go into too much detail, but. I had dreams about being pregnant for a week straight, and I didn’t really think it meant anything until, uh. God, Kate, do I really have to tell this story?”

“Please,” Chloe says eagerly, “you’re making me a believer.”

Dana tries to scowl at her, but she just ends up giggling. “Fine. Long story short, I was with my boyfriend, and we were, you know. And then just as things were, uh, speeding up, I looked out the window and there was a deer _right there_. Just, like, staring at me. Scared the shit out of both of us, kind of killed the mood. So we didn’t, and then when I woke up the next day…” The high of her cheekbones goes a little pink. “I was, uh, ovulating. And when I checked his wallet, it turns out he had lied about having a condom. So.”

Chloe’s laughing, she can’t help it, and even though Dana’s flushed and awkward she starts giggling too. It’s kind of nice, for a moment, to be laughing about something so weird without having to analyze it.

“Wait, so,” Chloe says, wiping at one eye. “That’s how you got to priestess? A deer cockblocked you?”

Dana rolls her eyes, looking skyward and grinning. “No, thankfully, it wasn’t just that. I also happen to put in a lot of effort around here, thank you very much, and I also get visions pretty often. Maybe once a week? And not just of the storm, sometimes of having her presence with me, sometimes of seeing, you know-” She lifts her right hand, palm flat, and Chloe remembers seeing Kate’s sketch of that same symbol, representing… something. “Anyway, the goddess affects all of us in different ways. Juliet gets more gossip, for one thing. Alyssa thinks the goddess protects her from projectiles or something. We all have a different relationship with her.”

The way she says relationship is strange, not like in the Veggietales _Jesus loves me, yes he does_ way, but rather like its something interpersonal, like real friendship, her eyes fond and believing. 

It’s too devoted. It makes everything that much realer, less of a joke, less of something Chloe can dismiss as psychobabble bullshit. Against her better judgment, she says, “What does Rachel think the goddess has done for her?”

Kate and Dana look at each other, knowing and mysterious, and something like jealousy stirs in the pit of Chloe’s stomach, before Kate speaks again.

She’s looking at Chloe like she’s asking her to keep a secret when she says, “Rachel thinks the goddess saved her life.”

Rachel has never, ever told Chloe that.

Before Chloe can even open her mouth to enquire, there’s a cool arm slipping into the crook of her elbow, and Rachel herself is smiling between the three of them. “Hey, guys. So you all got acquainted then?”

Chloe just nods, too stunned to say anything, and Kate just smiles meditatively and drifts away again. Dana grins cheerfully at the two of them, says, “Bye, Chloe, nice to meet you!” before rejoining the herd.

But Rachel seems pleased, having come out to see Chloe conversing with other girls like a real being, and jostles her a little, grinning. “Look at you, Miss Congeniality.”

Halfhearted, Chloe jostles her back but can’t meet her eyes, thinking over _Rachel thinks the goddess saved her life_. “Yeah. Shut up.”

Still smiling, Rachel just hooks their arms tighter. “I’m so proud, my baby’s all grown up and having real conversations about our local deity like an adult.” When Chloe doesn’t respond, she just shrugs. “Anyway, I finished with the premonition box. All bullshit and storm stuff, nothing good. You wanna head out?”

Desperately. “And do what?”

Shrugging, Rachel starts to pull her towards the door. “Don’t care. Get high in your truck or go to the beach or something. I need to be back by five to give tours, though, could you get me back here for then?”

Five o’clock is only two hours away. “Sure.”

Most girls wave at Rachel as they’re heading out, but some wave at Chloe too, and she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t wave back. They’re nice girls, sure, and Chloe’s kind of an asshole, but she still has less than zero interest of being a part of their fan club.

Rachel’s about to say something to her as the door swings open, but before she can speak, a third girl bashes into the two of them, stumbles back, then scowls. “Watch where- oh, fuck. I didn’t know you were going to be here, Amber.”

Victoria Chase. Chloe recognizes her, not because she’s ever fucked with anyone as snobby as Victoria Chase, but because at a time in her life she had needed money and did not have a job. So before Joyce had let her work at the Two Whales, Chloe learned when you need money, it’s smartest to scope out who has it and who doesn’t. And Victoria Chase definitely had it.

Which makes the fact that she’s walking into the goddess cult church even weirder. Victoria Chase certainly isn’t wanting for anything.

But Rachel doesn’t look surprised. “Hi, Victoria. Yeah, bad timing. But we’re just heading out.”

When she says we, Victoria’s gaze flicks to Chloe, and narrows. “Oh, are you indoctrinating the gutter trash now? God, why they let you be in charge I’ll never understand.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Chloe says before Rachel’s nails can dig into her forearm, but at least the pressure stops her from lunging forward. “Why the fuck are you even here?”

“She has her own shrine,” Rachel mutters under her breath. 

Victoria smirks, but Chloe barely sees it happen, angles to look at Rachel’s expression to make sure she’s not being fucked with. It looks like she’s not. “Seriously?”

Rachel just gives a short, impatient nod, glancing at Victoria from the corner of her eyes, and Chloe turns back to look at Victoria again. The girl looks proud of herself, but there’s still something sharp and a little gaunt to her face, not quite loneliness but recognizable pain. “What the fuck, you’re in on this bullshit? What’s in it for you?”

“None of your fucking business,” Victoria Chase snaps, running her hand through her cropped hair. “Jesus, Amber, I’ve told you a hundred times I’m not interested in doing tours.”

“So I haven’t made you do any,” Rachel says, pleasantly but through her teeth. “Chloe and I were just leaving, and she asked you a question. Relax.”

And she makes to tug Chloe away, but Chloe stands her ground. “No, wait, I have to know. What has this so-called goddess done for you that you feel the need to drive out to this pit and preach about her? What’s she bothered to show you, then?”

“Chloe,” Rachel says warningly, which isn’t really like Rachel, and only makes Chloe more interested in the answer. She digs her heels harder into the gravel when Rachel tugs again.

Victoria Chase’s face is hard as stone, and for a moment Chloe thinks she might just shoulder past without speaking. But then she says, “Ever ask your stepdad who gave him the tipoff to bust Mark Jefferson and Nathan Prescott last February?”

Rachel’s hand falls away from Chloe’s arm. Chloe just blinks. “What?”

Victoria gives her one more challenging look, then just shakes her head, finally shouldering past her into the warehouse. “Fuck off, both of you,” she mutters, and then is gone.

The two of them stare after her for a moment. Then Rachel’s face goes blank, and she starts marching off in the direction of Chloe’s truck. After another moment of suspended animation, Chloe has to chase after her. “Hey, hey, what the fuck was that?”

“Victoria is not officially affiliated with the church,” Rachel says, tone as brisk as her pace, without looking at Chloe. “She likes to keep her name out of it. But she could be a priestess if she wasn’t such a bitch about it, her connection to the goddess is nearly as strong as Kate’s. And she claims that she was the one who tipped off the police about Jefferson and Prescott last winter, that she had a dream where the deer led her to their fetish shack and that she followed Nathan there to confirm it was real in the day. We only know this because she wrote it down at her shrine, she never talks about it with any of us.” Reaching the passenger side of the truck, she turns on her heel to face Chloe, expression still close to blank. “Can we not talk about this anymore?”

If Chloe’s being honest with herself, she knows that Rachel was half in love with Mark Jefferson, back when that creep taught at Blackwell. Probably more than just half, if she’s being _really_ honest with herself. When he and Nathan Prescott got bagged, she didn’t see Rachel around for nearly a week, and when she finally did show back up, neither of them talked about it.

That’s okay. If Chloe doesn’t have to talk about the goddess, Rachel doesn’t have to talk about her former crush on a subzero-level sex offender. In fact, she’d prefer if they not talk about it.

But as Rachel’s climbing into the truck and Chloe’s walking around to the other side, it suddenly hits her that Victoria had specifically said _your stepdad_.

David, who’d been involved in the bust but never spoke about it, David who Chloe never spoke to if she could help it.

Once they’re both in the car and Chloe’s turned the ignition, Rachel settles back against the seat and turns to face her, head resting against a crooked palm, all her attention directed at Chloe again. “So? Ignoring Victoria, what did you think?”

Chloe’s still thinking about how David is always silent. She says, “I think you guys are all out of your gourds.” Then, at Rachel’s pout, she concedes, “But. Some of it was interesting.”

Rachel immediately perks up. “Interesting how?”

It’s all so complex, for one thing. For another, how tons of high school girls who have better things just believe so devoutly in something they themselves made up. The deer appearing everywhere. Lots of things. Chloe shrugs. “I dunno. Just interesting.”

Rachel gets the hint. They drive around town and get high and laugh about how fucking hysterical random dogs on the sidewalk look, and when Chloe drops Rachel off in front of the warehouse again at four forty-five, they don’t bring up the goddess again.

\---

When Chloe pulls into the driveway at six, having run out of places in town to mill about without getting yelled at by storeowners, Joyce and David are both at the dinner table, chatting quietly and picking at meatloaf. When the door swings open and shut, Joyce looks up; David’s head stays ducked down. “Chloe! You’re home early. Why don’t you grab a slice of loaf and join us?”

“Uh-” She’s about to say no because she always says no, because saying no is smarter than sitting down and immediately getting picked for a fight, but she hears Victoria Chase’s sharp voice in her ear again and hesitates. “Uh, sure.”

Joyce beams when she sits down, looking between her and David with unfounded hope. It nearly makes Chloe feel bad for saying no all the time. Nearly. “So, honey, how was your day?”

“Fine,” Chloe says noncommittally, taking a bite of meatloaf. After seeing Joyce’s slightly disappointed face, she swallows and continues, reluctantly, “A little weird. A girl at the diner came in, ordered pancakes, and left like a second later.”

“I noticed that too,” Joyce says thoughtfully. “Cute girl, sort of strange. It reminds me a little of the time…”

She starts telling a story Chloe’s sure she’s told a thousand times, so she zones out and focuses on David instead. He’s still not looking up, seemingly absorbed entirely in the meatloaf, frowning down at it as if it’s done him wrong.

 _Ever ask your stepdad who gave him the tipoff to bust Mark Jefferson and Nathan Prescott last February_?

Chloe decides she might as well just cut to the chase. After Joyce finishes rambling, she puts her fork down and says, “David, was it Victoria Chase who gave the tip about Jefferson and Nathan Prescott back in February?”

There’s a beat of silence, and both adults just stare at her. She stares back, steely-eyed, until David looks away again to take another bite of meatloaf. “It was an anonymous tipoff.”

“But you know who it was, don’t you?” Chloe says, distrusting the way he won’t meet her eyes. “You were the one that got tipped off, it wasn’t anonymous to you.”

Joyce opens her mouth, probably to reprimand, but David beats her to the punch. “Why do you care, Chloe?”

Both gazes level on her again, and this time Chloe swallows. She’s walked herself right into an interrogation without thinking, which, stupid, and that evokes an immediate fight-or-flight response, the one that’s worn down on flight and sharper on fight. Still, though, she has to get to the bottom of this. It’s important. “Whatever, okay, so Rachel dragged me along to the goddess church today and while she-”

“That creepy fucking cult?” David interrupts, his eyes going narrow and mean. “Chloe, I’ve told you a thousand times to stay away from-”

He’s using his army voice, the one that goes straight up Chloe’s spine, and on impulse she fires back, “I’m a fucking adult and I can do what I want, and you’re _not_ my dad-”

“Language, the both of you,” Joyce snaps, “this is the dinner table.” Her gaze lands hard on Chloe, and it’s a look Chloe’s all too familiar with. “Chloe-”

“Don’t tell me to drop it, Mom, I’m not dropping it!” Chloe says, and her voice cracks a little at the end, probably due to the pitch of her voice going up. Joyce and David both blink. “Those fucks were kidnapping and torturing girls, and he’s the one that busted them and we never talk about it, why can’t I ask? It could’ve been any of the girls in that church who were next, it could’ve been someone I-”

“Victoria Chase was the one who gave the tipoff,” David says.

Chloe’s jaw snaps shut. When she looks at him, he’s staring right back, gruff and solemn with meatloaf still dangling from his lifted fork. 

“She was?” she says, and she’s surprised by how small her voice is.

He just nods, his expression dark and faraway like he’s back there again. “She came to me during school, talking about how she couldn’t trust the cops. I think she was thinking I could protect Prescott somehow, but it’s not like he wasn’t a guilty little shit. But she did seem really torn up about it, even as she was giving me directions to where they would go. Arrested Jefferson and Prescott during school hours, called in some old friends, did a search of that fucking shack. They’d gotten to so many girls before we found them out.”

His eyes close, and the fork goes clattering down onto his plate. Chloe jumps at the noise, and Joyce reaches out quickly to cover his hand with hers, but he just shakes his head. He opens his eyes again, and looks straight at Chloe. She straightens up; his eyes are more serious than she’s ever seen them, and that’s saying something.

“Your friend, Rachel Amber,” he says, “she was their next target. We found an empty binder with her name on when we swept the place.”

It’s like every cell in her body is doused in ice water. 

She doesn’t even remember standing up, just that suddenly she’s on her feet. “Thanks for dinner, Joyce,” she says mechanically, “not hungry anymore, good night guys,” and then her legs are carrying her up the stairs, without her giving much thought to their function, only thinking of Rachel, Rachel in that shack, Rachel being devoured alive by hungry eyes, Rachel. 

Joyce’s voice floats up as she reaches the topmost stair, saying, “Oh, David, why would you tell her that,” and she hears his gruff response of, “she asked,” just before her bedroom door slams shut.

\---

“...oh. Okay, hi, this is Rachel. I can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message if it’s important and I will get back to you very soon. Okay, thanks, bye!”

Chloe starts talking before the phone even beeps. “God damn it, Rachel, answer your fucking phone, I talked to David about the Jefferson thing and what Victoria said was true, all of it. But he also told me that- that you- fucking, I’m not leaving this on the answering machine, fucking call me back you asshole.” She hangs up before her voice gets too panicky, throws her phone across the room, and grips the edges of her bed, takes several long, deep breaths.

She fully intends to wait up all night for Rachel to call her back, but when she lies down on her back two minutes later she immediately falls asleep, and for the first time in nearly a year, Chloe Price has a dream. 

\---

In her dream, Chloe is at the lighthouse. That’s not that weird, Chloe’s had dreams about the lighthouse here and there ever since she was little, because she used to go to the lighthouse a lot. What’s weird is that the girl from the diner is there with her in the dream, and it looks like she’s crying. 

It’s raining, and Chloe feels like something big is happening just to her left, something important and familiar, but in the dream it’s not more important than the girl from the diner. Chloe can’t bring herself to look away from her face, so she doesn’t see whatever’s happening next to them. 

Chloe reaches out with one hand as though to give the girl something, and when she looks down to look there’s a blue butterfly in her hand, its delicate wings pulsing and shivering in the rain, bright and electric against the darkness of the sky. Her mouth says, “This is the only way.”

The girl from the diner looks at her in horror, and her mouth moves but Chloe can’t hear her voice. Chloe says something back, but the words are old and forgotten and get lost in the noise of thunder anyway. What really matters is that what she says just seems to make the girl look even more upset, and her mouth starts moving again, tears and rain falling down her cheeks.

The corners of Chloe’s own eyes are pricking.

Suddenly the girl’s mouth stops moving, and her eyes go wide. She reaches out her right hand, palm flat, and touches at the air experimentally, like she’s testing something. Her face goes weirdly slack.

“It doesn’t have to be you,” she says, and suddenly Chloe can hear her voice, soft in its cadence but somehow stronger than the storm. “Chloe, I think I-” She does the same thing with her hand again, and then her expression sets itself again, this time into determination. “I can do this for you.”

And either there was a gap in the dream or Chloe forgets a segment upon waking, because suddenly the conversation cuts off. Then the two of them have moved, not too far, but now the girl is standing at the very edge of the cliff, with Chloe on sure ground in front of her.

The girl’s arms are spread wide for balance, and she looks like a martyr. “Chloe,” she says, and her voice breaks, and her mouth moves again but whatever she says is lost in the wind.

Then, without warning, she’s leaning backward, an angle to the earth, arms still spread wide, and goes falling clean and silent off the side of the cliff.

Chloe screams, and runs forward, reaching out for her with desperate hands, and that’s how she wakes, sitting up with one arm outstretched, open-mouthed and hoarse. “-ax!”

Even after her heart stops racing, even when she lies back down and takes seven deep breaths and closes her eyes, she can’t get that image of the girl from the diner, falling, out of her head.

Her name had been Max. Chloe remembers that now.

In the end, though, she’s only the girl from the diner. Chloe doesn’t need to dwell on it. She goes back to sleep, and doesn’t have any more dreams.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one went unbeta'd for the sake of the holidays. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it!

When Chloe wakes up the next morning, it’s to the cacophony of her phone buzzing and Joyce shouting her name. “Chloe! Chloe, lazybones, your ass better be down here ready to go in five-”

Eyes still heavy with sleep, Chloe reaches blindly for her phone and cracks one eye open above her pillow to examine it. The bright blue light tells her that Rachel Amber has called her four times, recorded two voicemails, left twenty-eight texts, and that her shift at the Two Whales starts in nine minutes. 

“Fuck,” she mutters, rolling out of her sheets and just barely catching herself before she lands flat on her ass on the floor. She has to ditch the phone in order to tug on a pair of jeans and locate a clean shirt, and by the time she’s mostly fully dressed and has her cell in hand again, there’s an impatient car horn outside.

Even as she’s tumbling into the passenger side of the car, she’s only halfway through typing in her passcode when Joyce says, “My goodness, Chloe, the sandman have his claws that deep in you?”

“Weird dream,” Chloe says noncommittally, without looking up. As her messages screen loads up, she runs a cursory hand through her hair, catches on about five snarls, and grimaces, reaching into the backseat to grab her beanie and tug it over her head.

Rachel’s messages have finally appeared when Joyce says thoughtfully, “I had a strange one, too, now that you mention it. What was it… I was in the diner, and there was some kind of fire going on just outside-”

“Uh-huh,” Chloe says absently, scrolling up.

 **Rachel** : its super rude to leave a message and turn off ur phone btw (9:45)  
**Rachel** : whatever im goin to bed (9:51)  
**Rachel** : chlo???? you awake?? (12:31)  
**Rachel** : this is super important!! (12:32)  
**Rachel** : answer ur phone god damn (12:46)  
**Rachel** : text me back u heathen (1:03)  
**Rachel** : if you wake up and you had a weird dream CALL ME (1:59)  
**Rachel** : r u srsly still asleep??? (6:42)  
**Rachel** : ur impossible. im comin to the diner to chew ur ass out w/ reinforcements so be ready (7:00)

“...even listening to me, Chloe?”

She looks up to see Joyce looking disapprovingly at her over one side of her nose. Shoving her phone back in her pocket, she tugs her beanie a little lower and says, a shade defensive, “What?”

Joyce sighs. “I was _asking_ what on earth got into you last night at dinner. Bringing up that whole awful Mr. Jefferson business. You made David very upset.” 

David’s always very upset, if Chloe’s supposed to take Joyce’s word for it. And while she’d rather take her word for it than have to see the man herself, it gets tiring hearing about it all the same. “Hey, Joyce, in case you didn’t notice, I was pretty upset too.”

Slouching down in the seat, it’s easier to peer at Joyce out of the corner of her eyes, and when she does she sees pursed lips and troubled eyes, uncertainty on whether to reprimand or comfort. It’s how she always looks when she pits Chloe and David against each other in the same sentence, and Chloe wishes she would just pick a side already. “I know, honey, but you can’t just- you and David _never_ speak, and when you do it’s always-”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk to him because we always fight,” Chloe mutters, “and maybe I never go home because I don’t want to see him, and maybe if you thought about me for once instead of how I make David ‘very upset’ then-”

The car comes into a hard park outside the diner, and the force of it throws Chloe forward and cuts her off. When she settles back against the seat, scowling and pulling up her hat again, Joyce has two high red spots in each cheek, lips thin and pale and tight in her face.

“Chloe,” she says, staring straight ahead at the diner, “if you think for a minute I’m not _always_ thinking about you-”

All the fight goes out of Chloe at that, at the words and at the sight of Joyce pink-cheeked and shaking and upset, and she feels so shitty immediately that all she wants to do is get out of the car and slam the door.

She holds that impulse down, though. “Hey, I’m sorry,” she says, and tentatively touches Joyce’s arm without looking at her. Joyce turns to face her head-on, though, looking startled. “I’m sorry, all right? That was shitty of me to say. It’s just- things are weird right now.”

Joyce looks away from her but doesn’t shrug off her hand, just shakes her head. “Oh, to be young again,” she says, and she sounds rueful but she also sounds a little fond, so Chloe figures they’re probably okay for now.

The bar’s already full when they come into the cafe, Joyce tossing an apron Chloe’s way, but when she does a quick look around there’s no sign of Rachel or entourage yet. It looks like one booth is occupied, but from what Chloe can see from behind, it’s just one person, sitting by themselves and tapping their foot methodically against the stand. 

A pad and pen strikes Chloe square in the head, and she just manages to catch them before they hit the floor. “Ow, Joyce-!”

“You’re on tabletop duty,” Joyce says firmly, nodding towards the occupied booth with a stern look, and considering they’ve already done their time on thin ice this morning, the most complaining Chloe does is just a quick roll of the eyes.

She’s already approached the booth and is giving the tired spiel of, “Hi, I’m-” before seeing it’s the girl from yesterday looking up at her. Max, who ordered the pancakes and ditched.

The girl who fell off the cliff in her dream.

“Oh,” Chloe says, and then, stupidly, “it’s you.” Then, quickly, to save face, she lifts her pen and pad hurriedly and adds, “Max, right?”

The girl blinks at her, eyes wide. She has nice eyes, a warm kind of blue, and Chloe does her best not to stare too long. “You remembered my name?”

Which is probably a little weird, yeah, but Chloe can mask it. “Sure I remember your name. This isn’t some dive, you know, we have some of that Cheers vibe.” Then, a little daringly, “Do you remember mine?”

“Chloe,” Max says immediately, and when Chloe looks at her in surprise she just grins. “What? Like you’re the only one that can…”

It seems like there was meant to be more to that sentence, but it trails away, and Max frowns, as if she’s pulled a muscle or something, some small indiscernible pain in her face. Chloe waits, but she doesn’t say any more.

After the silence has dragged on long enough to be awkward, she quickly looks back to her pad again. “Well, uh. How come you ditched yesterday, anyway? Our pancakes aren’t that bad, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Max says, and the way she says it is so genuine it makes Chloe look back at her again. That pained look is still set in her cheeks, and she’s not looking directly at Chloe but rather at somewhere near her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have- I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

Even though technically this is a sensible response, Chloe feels like there’s a discrepancy between what she’s saying and what she means by it. Still, Max looks so troubled that she doesn’t press it, just shrugs, tucks her pen behind her ear. “I get it. Weird stuff going on in this town all the time. I mean, I had the _creepiest_ dream last night-”

“I know,” Max mutters. 

Chloe freezes. “What?”

Maybe it’s the shock in Chloe’s voice, but Max goes still and looks up at her a little nervously. “W-what?”

“Y-you said,” Chloe says, and it’s going to sound even crazier coming out of her mouth than it had been coming out of Max’s, “I said I had a weird dream, and you- did you say ‘I know’?”

Max shakes her head, slowly, eyes staying locked on Chloe’s face as though to emphasize sincerity. “No, I just- I just said ‘oh’- but like a question, like, ‘oh’?”

“Oh,” Chloe says, exhaling, and takes it as the truth, because even if it’s not what she heard it’s what makes sense. “Oh, okay. Sorry.”

Leaning forward a little against the table, Max is still looking up at her face. “Anyway, uh. Your dream. Do you remember what it was about?”

Considering it was about Max, which, awkward, Chloe’s about to deflect the question, brushing some hair out of her face, until she catches Max’s expression again. 

She’s dead serious, narrow-eyed and solemn, and the sharpness in her eyes makes Chloe shiver a little, with surprise or maybe a little fear or something else she can’t or doesn’t want to name. “Um-”

The diner door bangs open, and they both jump and look around. At the front of the diner, Rachel has stalked in with authority, trailed by what looks like the entire coalition of goddess cult girls. Her eyes rove the restaurant with intent, then land on Chloe with a vengeance. “There you are. Thank god, I thought you might’ve died. Cell coverage stop working at the Price residence?”

“Rachel, please,” Joyce says from the counter, sounding amused, as Chloe says, “Fuck off, I’m with a customer.” Then, when Rachel glares and the other goddess girls shift around awkwardly, “Jesus, of course I’m going to listen to your drama, relax. Get a booth, I’ll be there in a second.”

As Rachel and the other girls are crowding into a booth, shifting and squeaking, Chloe turns back to Max, who’s shrunk down in her seat and gazing carefully over her shoulder at the goddess cult with a combination of curiosity and wariness. Her eyes seem trained on Rachel especially, which isn’t a surprise. Most eyes are usually drawn to Rachel.

It still makes something base and ugly stir in Chloe’s stomach, though. “Yeah, that’s Rachel,” she says, and Max jumps again, looking up at her with wide eyes. “The one I mentioned before, in charge of the goddess thingy. You know.” 

Max just nods once, short, then smiles, tentative. “She’s pretty.”

“Yeah,” Chloe says shortly, and brings her pen to paper again. “Anyway, she gets kind of bitchy when she’s not being waited on, so. What’ll you be having?”

The smile slips off of Max’s face, and she looks down at where her hands have folded against the tabletop. “Oh, uh. I didn’t even think about that. How about you, uh- you can go talk to Rachel and come back here when you’re done. I’m not in a rush.”

And it is tempting to ditch this- whatever this is, whatever Max is- to go back to Rachel, who may be strange too but is at least familiar, who makes sense in larger ways than Max seems to. Still though, in the moment Chloe hesitates, hands still tight on the pen and writing pad. “You sure?”

“Mm,” Max says, nodding again and giving an odd, wry smile. “Yeah. I’ve got plenty of time.”

For a moment Chloe just wants to stand there and look at her, memorize the way her arms fold and how her ankles knock together and the sharpness of her chin and the brightness of her eyes. But she can’t, and she doesn’t, she just shrugs and says, “All right then, I’ll be back,” and heads towards Rachel’s booth. 

Max smiles at her when Chloe looks back at her over her shoulder.

“Jeez,” Rachel says, when Chloe reaches her table, rolling her eyes and tucking her pen behind her ear again. “Did they end up ordering the whole menu? What took you so long?”

Chloe puts a hand on her hip. “Come back to me with this bullshit when you have a job in customer service. Anyway, it was that girl from yesterday who ditched on the pancakes. Name’s Max, I guess.”

Rachel frowns, and leans back in her seat to peer around Chloe. She’s at the very edge of the leftside bench, crammed in with Kate and Dana, with Alyssa, Brooke, and Juliet on the other side. All of the other girls are chattering quietly amongst themselves, but they all look troubled, a similar crease in all their foreheads as they whisper. 

“No one’s there,” Rachel says.

Distracted by the solemnness of Dana’s cheerleader face as she murmurs to Alyssa, Chloe takes a second to respond. “What?”

Looking back up at Chloe again, Rachel says, “That booth you were just at. No one’s there anymore.”

And when Chloe peers over her shoulder again, it’s true; Max’s spot is as vacant as all the other seats around it, without so much as a crease in the cushion left behind. 

“Son of a bitch!” Chloe says. “She dashed again! God, what a weirdo.”

For some reason, Rachel’s grinning. “Max, huh. Is she cute, Chloe?”

“Oh, fuck right off,” Chloe says, even though it wouldn’t be untrue to say yes. “Didn’t you have something super important to tell me? To explain all the aggressive texting?”

Immediately Rachel sits up, looking much more focused, which comes as a relieving alternative to talking about the pretty girl from the diner Chloe had a strange fucking dream about. “Yeah! Why weren’t you answering your phone, dweeb? It wasn’t that late!” Then her eyes glint, suddenly and surprisingly aggressive. “Were you having weird dreams?”

Holy shit. The pen falls out from behind Chloe’s ear, and she goes grabbing for it, but at least she can explain that away as gravity’s fault. “Uh, what? I mean. What? What kind of weird dreams?”

Rachel’s eyes narrow. “Just… weird,” she says, her tone light in contrast with a hard gaze. “You know. Any kind of bizarre stuff.”

But Chloe’s not going to admit anything. No matter what she says, it’s going to be marked down as weird goddess bullshit and then she’ll be wrapped up even more in this nonsense and it’ll reach a point where she won’t be able to get out. 

The more she thinks about it, the more she gets this feeling that the whole goddess cult is this big trap lying in wait, and that the closer Chloe comes to it, the easier it’ll be for that cage to snap around her and ruin her life. Whoever set it all up, if it was Rachel or Blackwell or Arcadia Bay or even the goddess herself, Chloe can’t help but feel like it’s some kind of lead-in to something larger and shiftier than any of these girls have picked up on yet.

Except, maybe, Victoria Chase. But that’s a thread Chloe doesn’t really want to tug. 

So she just shrugs, looks away from Rachel’s piercing gaze to pour out six mugs of coffee. “I don’t remember. That girl was in it, Max, but-”

“Did she die?” Rachel says.

Hot liquid goes spilling across the backside of Chloe’s hand, and she immediately seizes, lifting both the offending coffee pot and her reddening right hand high in the air and furiously shaking the latter. “Jesus fucking Christ! Holy shit- what do you mean, did she die?”

“You okay?” Rachel says, albeit a little dispassionately, and when Chloe nods, hissing through her teeth, she takes the coffee mugs and distributes them down the table to the other girls. “I _mean_ , did she die. Or do you remember seeing a butterfly?”

Butterfly in her hand, and death at the lighthouse. There’s something about this that feels like reminiscence. Chloe says, “Rachel, I really, genuinely don’t remember. But what’s up with it, anyway?”

Glancing across the table at the other girls, Rachel pauses for a moment, then says, sounding a little unsure and a lot unlike Rachel, “We all had dreams last night. And they were all kind of… the same.”

An uncomfortable hush falls over the table, just in time for Joyce to shout, “Chloe, stop dillydallying!”

“Just ask for six of my regular,” Rachel says impatiently, without any sort of consultation, and when Chloe gives the rest of the table a disbelieving look, Dana just waves her on, all the other girls looking at Rachel as if she’s about to bust out a new gospel. 

A little uncertain herself now, Chloe calls out, “Six Rachels, Joyce!” over her shoulder, and stays exactly where she is. “What do you mean, the same?”

Rachel’s hands have folded on the table, and she never sits like the way she’s sitting now, tight and compact. Rachel lounges. She always has. “I had this dream last night,” she says, slowly, “before I called you. I was in the junkyard, and there was this flash of blue on the ground, and I kept walking towards it- you know how in falling dreams, it’s like you just keep falling forever, like the ground gets closer and closer but you never hit? It was a little like that, I felt like I was walking forever without getting any closer. But I did get there, eventually, and there was the little blue butterfly like-”

One hand untucks itself from the other to point, distractedly, at the butterfly pin on her lapel. Chloe’s gaze moves towards it, and it’s the same, the exact same as the little delicate thing she’d held in one palm last night. In her own dream. 

But Rachel’s still in story mode, oblivious to whatever disquiet might flicker across Chloe’s face. “And it was on top of- um.” Her voice falters, just a little, and Chloe’s gaze lands hard on her eyes again, startled. Rachel bites her lip. “It was on top of my body? Like, I was looking down at myself, and the other me was just lying there dead. In a- in a bag.”

And it’s just a dream, really, Rachel’s sitting right there and she’s fine. Chloe’s mouth goes dry anyway. 

Kate, from Rachel’s other side, says, “Rachel-”, gentle as anything, and reaches for her hand, but Rachel just shakes her head and refolds her hand and goes on, looking straight at the center of the table. “It wasn’t just me, though, Chlo. All of us had the same kind of weird dream. And not even just us. We were getting _calls_. In the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, but it was especially weird for you and Kate,” Brooke says suddenly, and Chloe blinks. Brooke has a sharp kind of way of speaking, and the way she says those words are especially incisive, glancing between Kate and Rachel and Chloe as if daring any of them to contradict her. “Everyone else was dreaming about the storm, you guys’s were different-”

“Yeah,” Dana says. “All the calls were about dying and seeing butterflies, but in the storm. Like, Brooke and Juliet and I all dreamed about being at Blackwell and seeing the butterfly inside our dorm rooms, and-”

“And Alyssa-” Juliet pitches in, looking desperate to speak, but is cut off by Alyssa saying, “And I was outside, and that butterfly was right in front of me, and I fell, but I could see the storm, still.” She looks directly up at Chloe, who takes a step back. “It’s a tornado, the storm. I saw it.”

How to respond to that, Chloe has no idea. But luckily she doesn’t have to, because Juliet speaks again, looking a little peeved at having been interrupted. “But Kate’s and Rachel’s were different. They weren’t in the storm, but they still saw death in the butterfly, didn’t you?”

Kate is frowning, hands pressed together in a tent at the elbows and a prayer at the palms, leaning hard down on the table and face scrunched with effort. “It was… raining, in my dream,” she says. “So it could have been related to the storm? But I don’t think it was. It was like that vision I have a lot, where I’m standing on the roof and there’s birds everywhere. But this time it was butterflies instead of birds, everywhere, and I thought-” Her eyes close, brow creased so hard it looks painful. “I turned around, and I thought I saw her. The real her, not the deer but the goddess’s true form. But then I fell- I fell off the roof, and I kept falling-”

Her voice stutters and cuts off just as all the other girls erupt into chatter at once, in varying levels of distress, and Chloe’s about to add her own voice to the throng to ask what Kate means by _the real her_ , but just as she opens her mouth opens Joyce calls, “Chloe, order up!”

“I’ll be right back,” she says, but no one so much as glances at her, not even Rachel, whose gaze is trained on Kate with fearful focus. A little disquieted, both by the conversation and her place outside of it, Chloe takes her time coming up to the counter. 

Joyce plants the serving tray firmly on Chloe’s arm, glancing curiously over her shoulder at the girls’ booth. “What in the fresh hell is going on over there?”

“I don’t know,” Chloe says, and it’s true. She shakes her head a little, tries to come back briefly to the reality where Joyce is. “I have no idea, it’s so weird. Cult stuff.” And she’s heading back to the table before Joyce can question her further.

When she comes back, all the girls are muttering to each other again, in the place of a cohesive conversation, and Rachel is just tapping one fingernail against the smooth surface of the table, looking pensive. As soon as Chloe places a plate in front of her, she looks up so abruptly it seems painful. “Skip work today.”

“Can’t,” Chloe says, dishing out the other five plates to the other goddess girls, who take them with varying levels of enthusiasm. “Got into a fight with Joyce this morning, she won’t be in the mood to put up with my shit.”

Exhaling hard through her nose, Rachel taps all the nails on one hand in quick succession, then says, “Whatever. I’ll talk to Joyce. This is important, I’m sure she’ll understand.”

This isn’t the first time nor will it be the last that Rachel will try to get Chloe to skip out on work because of one of her whims, but this time her expression isn’t very whimsical. Chloe frowns down at her, trying to catch her distracted gaze and failing. “What’s so important?”

“I need to go there,” Rachel says, expression distant. “To the junkyard. If the goddess was trying to tell me something, then I need to go there and check it out, but… if what I saw really was my own death, I probably shouldn’t go alone.” She turns her pleading look on Chloe, the one that she only uses when circumstances are really dire, and it really drives home the gravitas of this whole thing for Chloe, the seriousness of a dream death in Rachel’s mind. “I need you with me, Chloe.”

And of course Chloe will never say no to her, and never when she asks her like that, desperate and whispering and intimate and _needing_. Of course Chloe will go with her. 

So she just sighs. “And that’s what you’re going to tell Joyce? You had a dream sent from the lesbian goddess so I need to ditch for the day to give you a ride to the junkyard?”

Relieved, Rachel leans back against the booth, thinking, and then shakes her head. “Nah. I’ll just tell her I’m having a personal emergency.”

“But you’re not having a personal emergency.”

“Believe me,” Rachel says, and Chloe almost always does, “I am.”

\---

If Rachel wants something to happen, it happens.

“Can you explain something to me?” Chloe says. She’s looking at the road and not Rachel, and she figures the conversation will go easier this way. Still, her hands are tight on the steering wheel. “About this goddess thing.”

Even in her peripheral vision, she can see Rachel perk up. “Yeah? What?”

“Don’t get too excited,” Chloe mutters, taking a turn off road and onto dirt. “It’s not about her. I just want to know what it is you’re looking to get out of this.”

There’s a pause, and it’s very tempting to look at Rachel but Chloe doesn’t, she won’t. “What do you mean?”

The wreckage of vehicles and appliances has come within sight, and Chloe pulls in just beyond the gate, parks a little sharp as if to wake them both up. “I mean, why are you so- so into this? You know, like being head priestess and working all the time and keeping all these records- what’s in it for you? Why are you doing it?”

Now she looks at Rachel, but Rachel isn’t looking back, she’s facing Chloe and cradling the side of her head in one hand but is frowning down at the cracked leather of the seat between them. “I don’t know if I can really explain it,” she says, eyebrows drawn. “But it’s like… I want to understand her, the goddess. I want to know who she really is. I want to figure her out. There’s something more to her, Chloe, she’s more than just a deity in the traditional sense, there’s just something about her that makes me feel like I need to know her-”

“But why?” Chloe says insistently. “Why do _you_ need to know her? Why’s it so important to you?”

Her gaze snaps up to Chloe’s face at that, finally, and they just look at each other for a long moment, neither knowing what to say. 

Then Rachel sighs. “Chloe,” she says, voice heavy, “this is a weird question, but… do you ever get the feeling like you're not supposed to be here?”

It’s an easy question, actually. “Fucking, yeah,” Chloe says, sliding down a little in her seat. “Of course.”

But that answer just creases Rachel’s brow, and she shakes her head. “I don’t mean like Arcadia Bay,” she says. “I mean, like… here. Living.” When Chloe’s eyebrows shoot up, she waves both her hands. “I don’t mean that I want to be dead! It just feels sometimes that I’m… wrong, somehow. That things are supposed to be different.” She huffs a laugh, a little uncomfortable giggle that sits in the air between them. “Sometimes I feel like I’m a ghost. Isn’t that weird?”

“Yes,” Chloe says blankly. “What-”

Rachel’s on a roll now, though. “I’ve felt this way for a while now, ever since… remember that day Kate and I came to the Two Whales to talk about the goddess for the first time? That’s when I started really feeling it. But I think the reason I am here is because the goddess saved me, somehow. I can’t explain it, but I feel like my life is tied to her so strongly. And that’s why I need to figure her out. I need to understand why I feel this way. If the goddess did save me, I need to know why.”

The dream of Rachel’s body lying cold and rotten in this junkyard is becoming worse and worse the more context Chloe’s given about it. She’s left her keys in the ignition.

Now, with Rachel meeting her eyes, she’s the one that has to look away. “So how long do you think that’s gonna take?”

This time she hears rather than sees Rachel frown. “What do you mean?”

“Like,” Chloe says, and she really can’t even look at Rachel now, “like, when do you think you’ll have it figured out? Because I think I’ll have enough money soon for us to drive out of this dump, but if you’re still-”

“The money?” Rachel repeats incredulously. “You mean... to go to Los Angeles?”

When Chloe rolls her eyes, they end up landing on Rachel by accident, and Rachel is looking at her with such naked surprise that her gaze gets trapped again. “Yes, to go to Los Angeles! We’ve been talking about this for years, and Rachel, I’ve nearly got all the money we need- we’re so close, but if you’re still hung up on this, when are we going to go? When will you have it all figured out?”

Rachel’s eyes are so wide, and it makes Chloe feel edgy and anxious- Rachel can’t have just _forgotten_ about going to L.A., it’s been their plan since they were sixteen. It’s not like Chloe’s been working at the Two Whales all this time just for kicks. Rachel can’t have forgotten. 

“I don’t… know,” Rachel says finally. “If I knew how long it would take, then-”

“Well, how long do you think?” Chloe snaps, impatient from hiding her impatience. “Because I don’t want to be waiting around here in Arcadia fucking Bay while you’re trying to achieve self-actualization, I thought this was important to you-”

“It is important to me!” Rachel snaps back, eyes going narrow in the way they do when Chloe’s about to lose a fight. “ _You’re_ important to me! But this is important to me too, and I don’t know how long it will take! People spend their entire lives trying to understand higher powers!”

It’s the wrong thing to say, and it jars Chloe, because Rachel never says the wrong thing. “Their whole lives,” she repeats.

That gets Rachel to blink once, twice, then she leans back into her seat, groans and closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. Chloe watches her, not doing anything at all, and then Rachel’s back in motion so fast it makes her jump. 

“That’s not what I meant,” she says. “I’m still figuring it out, Chloe, you gotta stick with me. Please.”

She’s giving Chloe her needing eyes again, but it’s the second time and the same hour and Chloe’s getting tired. She just stares back, and swallows, and doesn’t say anything. 

Rachel waits for her to speak. She waits for a long time. Then, eventually, she just sighs. “Well, I’m not going to get any closer to her just sitting here. Let’s go.”

And she’s out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and Chloe’s left ten paces behind with a sick feeling in her stomach.

When she clambers out of the truck herself, Rachel’s already halfway across the junkyard, a girl on a mission, searching the ground and walking in a zigzagging line, occasionally crouching for a second or two to inspect something. Briefly she skirts by their secret spot, and Chloe thinks she might step inside when she pauses outside the entrance. Then Rachel’s shoulders sink, just slightly, and she takes another left. Chloe hangs back, partially because she knows that they’ve gone deep into Rachel Territory now and also because there’s something she’s afraid of, here. 

In her mind she knows it’s just the junkyard, the same old grimy desolate spot she and Rachel have torn up hundreds of times, but there’s something ominous about it now. Maybe it’s just because she and Rachel have fought and tension is higher than normal. Maybe it’s because there’s the overhang of death here now, because of Rachel’s dream. Maybe it’s because the goddess has ruined everything, keeps ruining everything.

Maybe it’s because Chloe, the longer she hangs back from Rachel, keeps getting this sense that she’s been here before, here in this junkyard on a chilly fall morning, with someone who wasn’t Rachel.

Suddenly there’s a presence behind her, a voice saying, “What are you doing here?” and Chloe jumps about a foot in the air. But when she spins around, immediately defensive, it’s just Max from the diner standing there, frowning at her with her hands clasped behind her back.

She lowers her fists and blows out a breath. “Holy shit, Max, I thought you were the landlord or something. Don’t sneak up on people like that. Anyway, what are _you_ doing here?” Then, a little unnecessarily, “How come you skipped out on breakfast again?”

But Max’s gaze has already flicked to Rachel, and Chloe looks over with her; out of earshot of their conversation, Rachel has kneeled down by some tarp on the ground, tracing her fingers over the dirt. Her brow is creased, and Chloe thinks she’s never seen her more focused.

When Chloe looks back at Max, though, Max is visibly troubled, still staring at Rachel. “You guys shouldn’t be hanging around here too long,” she says, sounding distracted. “This isn’t… a good place.”

Chloe rolls her eyes, but can’t help smiling, half amused and half affectionate. “Thanks, Mom, we were careful to step over the asbestos.”

“That’s not what I mean!” Max says, so sharp that Chloe takes a step back, looking at her with renewed surprise. When their eyes meet, Max’s expression is fierce, but it fades off when she sees the shock in Chloe’s face, into something awkward and anxious. The forearms in her muscles grow tense, and Chloe can imagine the hands behind her back growing tighter around each other. “I just… this place has bad stuff in its mojo. Death. Darkness. You and Rachel, you shouldn’t be here too long.”

Death. Chloe looks back over to where Rachel is crouched down, palms now flat in the dirt. “You’re starting to sound like her,” she says, nodding in Rachel’s direction. “She had a dream about dying here, I guess.” 

When she looks back at Max, she’s frowning at Rachel now. “I think,” she says slowly, “I think… this goddess stuff that you’ve been talking about seems kind of dangerous.”

No one else at all has said this other than Max, and Chloe had been pretty sure she was the only one thinking it. Still, her gaze gets sharper, wanting Max to put the dark feeling inside Chloe into her own words. “What do you mean?”

“I feel like this is just messing with forces out of human control,” Max says, and her voice is quick and high and she isn’t looking at Chloe, her eyes are once again fixed on something a million miles away. “Listen, I understand wanting to know the truth. But what if it’s not worth it? What if just digging and digging in order to understand just hurts people? What if the goddess isn’t really _magnificent_ , what if she’s just-”

Her voice breaks, and when she looks at Chloe again, Chloe stiffens up under her gaze. It’s solemn, and sparkling with emotion, and it makes all of Chloe’s ribs ache in a way she can’t even begin to understand. 

“When normal people mess around with things they don’t understand,” Max says, and her gaze is fixed so solidly on Chloe that Chloe can’t even blink, “people get hurt, always. Innocent people. People you love. Sometimes, even if you have something amazing in your grasp, it’s better to leave it alone.”

There is no wind, suddenly, no bird chirping, no sound. Just Max from the diner and Chloe, standing there, looking at each other. 

Max’s eyes are solemn, unyielding almost, but there’s something so soft in the way she’s looking at Chloe that makes Chloe even more uncomfortable than the sudden stillness of the earth. “Do you understand?” she says, gently.

Chloe licks her lips, and she doesn’t understand, not anything. Instead, she opens her mouth, has to lick her dry lips before saying, “Who are-”

“Chloe!” Rachel’s voice shouts, and Chloe’s head whips around to see Rachel still crouching, still looking at the ground beneath her, still entirely oblivious what’s happening only a few hundred feet away from her. “Can you come here?”

“One-” But when Chloe turns back to speak to Max again, say something, the girl’s disappeared again. There’s not even footprints in the dirt beneath her. 

There’s definitely something fucking spooky about this junkyard today, and even spookier about Max, a girl who keeps appearing and disappearing only to confuse Chloe and look sad and vanish without telling any truths. Chloe hurries reaching Rachel’s side.

They speak at the same time, but Chloe steamrolls her with, “Did you see the girl that time?”

Rachel looks up at her, quick and surprised. “What girl?”

“Are you serious?” Chloe says, and spins in place on one heel, frustrated. “Ugh! The uh- the girl from the diner, she was just here-”

But Rachel’s frowning. “What was she doing here?”

“Fuck if I know,” Chloe says, deciding immediately at the sight of Rachel’s thoughtful frown to keep their talk about the goddess to herself, “she just showed up and disappeared again. God, it’s starting to freak me out, you don’t think-”

She doesn’t even get to finish before Rachel rolls her eyes. “You’re not being stalked by the cute girl from the diner,” she says, before turning her attention to the ground again. “Anyway, look at this. This is the exact same place I found myself in the dream last night, but… I don’t know. What does it look like to you?”

To Chloe it just looks like an expanse of dirt and a few lonely weeds. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

Shrugging, Rachel gets onto her feet. “I don’t know, I just thought-”

But her voice suddenly drops away, all of Rachel drops away, and suddenly Chloe is standing there looking at a body bag halfway buried in the earth. Her own hands are thick with dirt and dust, and when she looks beyond them there’s a face unwrapped from the top of the bag, the plastic of it ripped open by grabbing desperate hands.

It’s Rachel’s face in the bag, because it has to be, because it always has been. She’s rotten, and her hair and teeth are nearly gone, and the smell hits Chloe like a tidal wave. She claps her hands over her mouth, and screams through them, and from somewhere very close by a voice that’s not hers or Rachel’s is saying, “ _Chloe, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_ -”

“Chloe!”

This time Chloe really screams, hands flying away from her face, and Rachel has to grab her by both shoulders to keep her from bolting. Chloe nearly screams again, looking at her face, this one the real Rachel with pink cheeks and hair tucked behind one ear and roving, concerned eyes, but it’s such an echo of the decomposed one she just saw that her knees go weak. “Chloe, what- what’s- oh my god, you’re bleeding!”

Her fingers touch beneath Chloe’s nose, and come away scarlet. Chloe shoves Rachel’s hands off her shoulders, touches her own nose only to have both sets of fingertips come away near-soaked in blood.

Her head feels like it’s about to fall off her neck, pounding so loud with its own pulse that she can barely hear Rachel fussing over her.

What was that?

Whose voice was that?

She tunes back in to hear Rachel saying, “... see something?” and she has to blink a couple of times to come back to reality. “What?”

Rachel won’t stop touching her, but it seems like she doesn’t know what to do with herself; her hands keep touching at Chloe’s shoulders, hair, forearms, and then reaching for her bloody nose and then away. There’s genuine distress in her face that Chloe wishes she hadn’t put there. “What the fuck happened, Chloe, you scared the shit out of me! We were just- just standing here, and then all of a sudden you just started hyperventilating and-and screaming, and bleeding- what happened?”

“Don’t feel great,” Chloe mutters, and when she sinks down onto her knees Rachel guides her down, both hands still on her shoulders. “Just-”

Her own voice cuts off as her mind flashes back, involuntary, to that sight of Rachel, dead and cold and disgusting. Bile rises in her throat.

It’s a struggle to hone in on Rachel’s voice again, but she has to if she doesn’t want to vomit. “Chloe, did you- did you see something?”

Saying she saw Rachel dead makes it real. Saying she saw anything at all makes the goddess real, makes all this supernatural bullshit part of Chloe’s life too. Chloe drags the back of her hand beneath her hand, leaves a streak of blood on her cheek. “No, I just- just freaked, I don’t know-”

“Why are you lying?” Rachel says, and she sounds desperate, reaching for Chloe’s face to turn it in her direction. This time Chloe bats her hands away, and Rachel falls back on her knees, leaning down a little to look into where Chloe’s tucked her chin into her knees.

“She’s calling to you,” Rachel says, in a tone of wonderment this time, the blood starting to drip off her still hands. “Chloe, look at this. Look at what’s happening. This has to mean something. The goddess is connected to you too, she has to be.”

Chloe drags a hand across her face, feels the blood smear against her cheek, spits some out of where it’s leaked into her mouth. “I don’t care,” she says. 

Rachel giggles a little, but it’s all hysteria, with the smell of blood in the air and the vision of death so close, buried less than six feet deep in the distance between them. “What do you mean you don’t care, look at this! She’s reaching for you, and you don’t-”

“I don’t fucking want the goddess reaching for me,” Chloe snarls, and she shoots back up onto her feet, which is a dumb decision. She sways a little in place, and when Rachel goes to help steady her she jumps out of her grasp. “I don’t want the goddess fucking up my life more than she already has, I wish she’d leave me the fuck alone, I wish you’d both leave me the fuck alone!”

And if she feels bad storming out of the junkyard and driving away and leaving Rachel there, shocked and unsure, then it’s no worse pain than the pounding in her head that won’t stop beating, beating, beating.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many many many thanks to Haaku, Kaelin, and Briana for beta'ing!! And to Julien Baker for destroying my whole life as I edited it. 
> 
> This will probably be the last chapter for a couple weeks, because I have to focus on finals now! But it is VERY long, so I hope it tides everyone over in the meantime. Hope you enjoy!

Chloe crashes into her bed as soon as she gets home, as soon as she’s left the junkyard far behind her, because she can’t bear being conscious another second with her stomach turning on itself and Rachel’s dead face unerasable from her mind’s eye. Even though her brain is racing and she feels half-dead and her face is still grimy with dried blood, she falls asleep almost the second her head hits the pillow.

It ends up being a bad decision. Nightmares only get worse when they’re helped along by dreams.

Rachel’s face comes back to her again, the same way she saw it in the junkyard, only this time it’s closer, Chloe on her knees beside it, the scent thicker, the rot more visceral. Just the image of it is enough to panic her into waking again. It feels like it’s an immediate wake-up after crashing, but when she looks over at the clock it’s nearly four hours later.

There’s the light sound of knocking, so soft and constant it takes her a hazy moment to notice. Joyce’s voice comes carrying from beneath the crack of her door, “Chloe, honey? You in there?”

Thinking belatedly of how awful she must look, Chloe touches her face to find it still damp and acrid, and hurriedly if a little fuzzily calls back, “Trying to sleep, Mom!”

She’s rubbing at her sore nose with the back of her hand carefully when Joyce’s voice says, amused, “At seven in the evening? Ain’t like you, Miss Night Owl.”

“Tired,” Chloe shouts back, starting to get uneasy at how difficult dried blood is to scrub off with only her hands. Still, somehow lethargy is creeping over her again, heavy and pervasive, and she leans back against her pillow, left hand falling clumsy near the side of her head. “Long day, Joyce.”

“Apparently,” Joyce says warmly, but footsteps are clacking down the floorboards outside and her voice growing farther away now and Chloe doesn’t realize she’s feeling asleep again until she’s already there.

It’s back in the same place, the junkyard, Rachel’s dead body, Chloe on her knees, and the combination of smell and emotion are filling Chloe’s nose and throat and choking her. But this time there’s something slightly different about the setting, a slight pressure against her back and right side. She can’t tell what’s causing it, and it’s new and unsettling but not unfamiliar. 

But when she looks up, meaning to identify whatever’s leaning against her, her eyes get caught, instead, on what’s already directly in her line of vision. About ten yards away, a deer is standing in direct parallel from where Rachel’s corpse is lying cold in the earth, small and curious and staring directly at Chloe.

The goddess’s deer.

Chloe’s eyes go wide, and she manages to overcome the thickness of her tongue to choke out, “Get _out_ -!”

And startles herself awake again. This time, when she looks at the clock, it’s eleven p.m., a more reasonable time to be sleeping but a no less excusable time to be waking up.

Still, though, she feels like she’s learned her lesson. Sleeping equals bad dreams equals the vision bullshit the priestesses and Rachel are always going on and on about, which is what she went to sleep hoping to avoid in the first place.

If the goddess ends up being anything at all like a person, Chloe is going to literally strangle her. As much as she would like to, she can’t claim ownership to Rachel, but sleep and dreams are things that should belong to Chloe and Chloe alone.

Thinking of Rachel then, Chloe remembers leaving her in the junkyard (nine hours ago? shit), for the first time with a stab of guilt, and goes reaching for her phone on the bedside table. Then she remembers she’s still fully dressed, still wearing a hat and shoes, still with her phone in her pocket, and when she goes reaching beneath the covers to retrieve it she falls asleep again. 

It’s the same damn thing repeated over again, Groundhog’s Daying itself across Chloe’s subconscious- junkyard, Rachel dead, Chloe on her knees, pressure at her back. This time the part of Chloe’s mind that’s still conscious doesn’t want to look up, doesn’t want to see the goddess’s fucking deer looking at her with those big eyes, eyes that know things deer shouldn’t know, no one should know.

Still, it’s apparent that the dream has a narrative to follow, and isn’t interested in having Chloe go against it. So again Chloe looks up, straight ahead, beyond whatever’s still leaning against her, and there is something across the junkyard again but it’s not the deer.

Max from the diner is standing at the center of a patch of dirt, exactly where the doe had been, and she isn’t saying anything and she’s standing very still and something’s very wrong, very wrong about her. The junkyard is lit through with yellow sunlight, but Max from the diner is all dark, solemn, soaked through like she’s just been dunked in a bathtub. Her hair is plastered to her forehead and chin, and she’s shaking a little bit, hands and mouth trembling.

It takes Chloe a second, but she suddenly realizes that this is exactly how Max looked in her other dream, the one on the cliff, the one about butterflies and death.

Max spreads her arms wide. Martyr position. Just like before.

This time Chloe wakes herself up by yelping in real life, doused in a cold sweat and throat tight with something like fear.

When she rolls over, panting and clammy, she finds her pillow stained brownish-red all over, the new color visible even in the dark, sticky and smelling like pennies, and she chokes at the scent and feel of blood on her face.

Mechanically, she flips the pillowcase over, settles back down, and goes back to sleep for another three hours. 

There are no dreams the final time, but she doesn’t feel any better when she wakes up to the sound of Joyce banging pots together downstairs. 

Rachel hasn’t left her any messages. 

\---

She has a throbbing headache along with the flashing memory of death when she goes to work, and she’s in the crabbiest mood imaginable despite getting nearly fourteen hours of sleep, so Joyce puts her on counter duty. It’s easier to manage; Chloe and Joyce have both long since learned the regulars who frequent the counter aren’t typically deserving of smiles.

It’s only when she catches herself looking around for the third time, refilling Joe Mulligan’s coffee mug for the fourth, that she’s expecting to see Max again.

The idea startles her, because it immediately harkens back to last night’s final dream, Max standing rain-soaked in a sunny field and spreading her arms as if to hold up the world. A moment later, it also reminds her of seeing the actual Max yesterday, first in a booth and then in the real junkyard, knowing and unknowable and kind in a sad sort of way.

Moving on to refill Clark Monroe’s mug, Chloe tells herself that if Max does come back today, Chloe will have to ask her what she meant when she said the junkyard was dangerous, as if she knew somehow there was an echo of Rachel’s corpse in the earth, to check and see if Chloe’s just going crazy. 

After a moment, though, of refilling the coffee pot and of trying to imagine Max and a possible conversation, a possible answer, she realizes she isn’t even thinking of a possible answer at all, just the way Max’s thin legs knock against each other under the table and how her wristbones poke out from her skin. 

The chimes over the door sound, and it snaps Chloe out of her reverie just before the coffee pot overfills. Hurriedly she switches the machine off and turns around carefully, not entirely expecting Rachel or the girl Max but maybe hoping for one or the other.

It’s not either of them, and she sighs and goes back to filling mugs. It’s a young guy, maybe twenty-twoish and definitely an out-of-towner, you can tell by the way he’s bundled up in a jacket in early September. From the way he’s looking around with wide eyes and how his fingers tremble at the neck of his collar, he’s less likely here for coffee and more likely here to soak up the general holy aspect of a cult town.

Chloe doesn’t realize he’s trying to catch her eye until she’s already served two more helpings of bacon and three more of sausage. She wipes the grease off her hands onto her apron, then puts one on her hip. “Can I help you?”

Joyce looks up from where she’s taking an order at the leftmost booth, but then apparently decides Chloe can handle an eager college kid. The guy, meanwhile, lights up. “Uh, yes! Maybe? Um, I was wondering if you could tell me about the church of the goddess?”

Whatever might’ve been working to improve Chloe’s mood from this morning is killed off instantly. She grabs an empty mug from behind her and starts filling it. “It’s about ten minutes down the road, tours start at two.”

“Oh! Oh, well, yes, thank you, I know that, but-” The guy fumbles for a minute, then continues, “I was just wondering if maybe you could tell me, like, the general effect of the goddess’s presence on the town, I’ve heard most residents report having at least one vision related to-”

Lowering the pot to lift the mug, Chloe brings it to her lips, looks at the rim of it as she says, “You writing a paper or something?”

Flustered again but this time apparently pleased, the guy shakes his head and says, “No, but, I’m curious. It’s becoming phenomenal, I think, and who wouldn’t want to know more. So, I was wondering-”

“Dude, the priestesses and acolytes will do way better answering your questions than I will,” Chloe says, taking a long, slow gulp of coffee as an attempt at settling her jumpy nerves. It’s a stupid idea. “They have a lot of enthusiasm, I really recommend the tour rather than chatting up a waitress.”

The guy isn’t taking the hint. “Oh, I am taking it, thanks. Just asking around before they open to the public. But have- have you ever had a vision?”

She nearly chokes, lowers the mug and drags her hand across her mouth and swallows hard. “No.”

“No?” the guy says, disappointed. “Huh. I thought- never, really? You never had a dream about the, uh, storm, or-”

“Mister, with due respect and all that,” Chloe says, through grit teeth, “if you ask me another question about what I _dream_ about, this coffee pot is going straight up your ass.”

Maybe indelicate, but it gets the job done. The guy’s jaw immediately snaps closed, and he just blinks at her, shocked.

The hand that isn’t balled at Chloe’s hip is shaking. She snatches at the handle of the coffee pot with it again, clasps it tight. “Can I offer you some coffee, sir?” she says, sweetly this time, to the still-gaping tourist.

Faintly, he says, “Yes, thank you,” and as soon as she’s poured it he’s out the door, leaving a rather generous tip.

Rachel doesn’t come by the diner all day. Neither does Max.

\---

Rachel doesn’t leave her any messages, either, not the next day or the day after that. She doesn’t come by the diner. The part of Chloe’s brain that isn’t a fucking child knows that communication is a two-way street, that she probably should be the one picking up the phone after having a nosebleed and a panic attack and leaving Rachel stranded in the junkyard five miles from her house, but the part that’s petty just tells her if Rachel really cared about her, she’d be the one to call.

None of the other goddess cult girls are coming by the diner anymore either, though. 

At least no one’s bugging Chloe about having visions anymore, which is ironic, considering she’s finally started having them. 

\---

She has a new one about three days after the first, finally a respite from the Rachel-junkyard dream, but it’s still about death.

In this one she’s in the Blackwell bathroom, backed up against the wall nearest the door, and there’s something pressing into her side and someone pressing it there. 

They’re speaking, too, Chloe and the stranger, but both their words and the stranger’s face are lost to the blurriness and haziness that characterize the memory of dreams to someone awake.

What Chloe does remember, though, is that when she looked up beyond her attacker, the deer was standing on the other side of the bathroom, half-hidden by the stall dividers, the blue butterfly sitting even atop its head.

Both are watching her.

Chloe sputters, and for a moment the dream doesn’t feel like a dream at all, it just feels like something broken. “You!”

She doesn’t expect the deer to move, but it does- the butterfly disappears, and the deer takes two shaking, startled steps backward. 

It may have been a dream trick, or something Chloe makes up when she wakes, but for the briefest flash of a moment, the deer isn’t a deer. Instead, it’s something else small and familiar, something thin and scared that holds up her right hand.

Then there’s a sound like a train whistle, and a sudden pain in her side, and Chloe wakes up sweaty and panting, head pounding with a pulse harder and sharper than her heartbeat. 

The nosebleed isn’t so bad this time, but there is a phantom pain in her side for nearly half the following day.

\---

Frank is nasty when Chloe swings by his RV to buy, because he’s always nasty when Rachel’s not around. It’s always been evident he has a soft spot for her, but Rachel’s gone too deep into the church girl life to hang so much with the town drug dealer anymore. And since Chloe’s set on avoiding Rachel, it looks like she’s going to have to buy full price for a while, and deal with Frank on her own for a while. 

She supposes that, without Rachel, they’re both just assholes. 

“Thought you were skimping on cash,” he grouses, even as he takes the money. “And that’s why you haven’t paid full price in nearly a year. Road trip get cancelled, Chloe?”

She scowls at him, shoving the bag he hands her into her pocket. “Fuck off,” she says, even though the truth is he’s probably right. At the very best, it’s been postponed, but either way it doesn’t seem like Chloe needs to have such a tight grip on her cash anymore. “Don’t tell Rachel I was here.”

He just glares right back at her, already turning to head back inside, his manic dog barking up a storm from inside the trailer. “Why would I?”

And then they’re both alone again. 

\---

The town is restless, and Arcadia Bay is a town that never moves. Something is happening with the church, something that’s only spoken about in mutters rather than in headlines.

Rachel still hasn’t called Chloe. Chloe still hasn’t called Rachel. There’s no one to tell Chloe what’s happening at the warehouse near the sea. 

\---

Eight days since she’s last spoken to Rachel, and Chloe dreams about being in a dark room. 

It’s not any place she’s ever been before, not like the lighthouse or the junkyard or the Blackwell bathroom. There’s enough mystery in these fucking dreams without making up new locations, but it’s especially eerie here, in a place with no sound and only artificial light. 

Rachel is here. She’s tied to a chair in the center of the room, against a white strip of wall.

Chloe looks around. There’s no deer.

She comes up closer to Rachel, but not too close. Just stands in front of her. “Who did this to you?” she says, and her voice sounds too calm, too measured.

“What are you talking about?” Rachel says, without moving her mouth or blinking. “This isn’t real.”

Then her eyes roll upwards, like marbles, to look over Chloe’s shoulder. She frowns, but it’s the not the way Rachel really frowns, it’s too rough. “She’s not supposed to be here,” she says. “She knows that.”

When Chloe turns around, slow because that’s how dreams are, there’s no one there. Just a full red binder on the ground, labelled in Sharpie with a name Chloe is too far away to read. A butterfly comes fluttering down from nowhere, and touches down on it.

Death.

“No-!” and she turns around again just to see Rachel dead again, her head lolling back in the chair to expose the dirt and blood of her throat, before she wakes up. 

That day she stays home from work by being public about her nosebleed, and spends all day alternating washing her sheets and pillowcases and throwing up. 

\---

It’s been ten days since she last spoke to Rachel, and Chloe has lost three pounds and is becoming acclimatized to the scent of blood and fucking hates the goddess, just fucking hates her.

The sense of unease hasn’t let up in town, and it could be Chloe’s own paranoia adding fuel to the flame but it just seems like it’s getting worse. People are whispering to each other all the time now instead of just speaking. Someone’s carved the image of the deer into one of the Two Whale’s mirrors. Chloe burns herself on the stove twice, on purpose, just to make sure she’s awake and alive. 

The strange girl Max hasn’t been back around the diner, or back around anywhere, and Chloe has to assume she may have left town. 

And for the first time in ten days, a priestess comes back into the Two Whales.

It’s not Rachel, though. Instead, it’s Dana, accompanied by Juliet, hurrying into the diner on a rainy Monday morning with arms folded tight over their chests, stomping furiously on the mat as they enter. Dana’s the first to come up to the counter, Juliet smoothing some of her water-licked hair down back at the entrance. “Chloe!”

It’s a slow day, due to weather. Chloe catches the pencil she’d been rolling up and down the counter just before it rolls off and hits the floor, shoves it behind her ear. “Hey, Dana. What’s- uh, can I get you guys something?”

“N-” Dana starts, but then Juliet interrupts, coming up behind her and squeezing water out of her bun. “Oh, god, yes please. Coffee and a croissant.”

Dana gives her an impatient look, but just sighs when Chloe’s gaze turns on her. “Ugh, okay. The same. But soy milk with the coffee, please.”

Joyce has gone out to buy more food, so Chloe has to go to the back and grab the (slightly dusty) soy milk carton out of the fridge herself. She’s halfway through opening the storage door again when she hears them muttering to each other.

“- won’t tell us?” 

Dana, sounding irritated, “Probably because it’s not any of our business.”

It’s easy to imagine Juliet rolling her eyes. “If it’s not any of our business, then why are we here?”

“Because we’re supposed to be, we’re supposed to ask all students-”

“But she’s not a student!”

“Only because she dropped out, and anyway, it’s probable that it’s more about age than it is about the school-”

“It’s more than probable she’s having visions, Dana, and if she and-slash-or Rachel are keeping their lips zipped about it, then-!”

It’s Rachel’s name that has Chloe come forward, more instinctual than anything, out of the back. Both girls go silent immediately, Dana looking a little guilty, and Juliet nearly incensed, but Chloe just keeps moving on her track, light steps and a light expression. Waving the soy milk at Dana with one hand, she hands them their croissants, and says, lightly, “So what’s up, ladies? How’s the whole goddess thing going?”

They look at each other, but Chloe doesn’t feel like spending ten minutes just fucking around, just pours them their coffee and puts soy milk in Dana’s and then leans on the counter, looking them both in the eye.

She figures Juliet would crack first, with the way she’s fidgeting, but actually it’s Dana, setting down her coffee and folding her arms up. “Not good,” she says gravely, which sounds a little funny in her sweet voice. “All of the priestesses and acolytes, we’re all getting visions pretty consistently now, but they’re not really- good.”

When she doesn’t hurry to elaborate, Juliet jumps in to fill the gap. “Yeah, like, they’re all about the storm now, or they’re just weird if you’re special like Kate and Rachel are, but most people are dreaming about _death_.” A little uncomfortably, her hand comes up to adjust her small blue pin, and she speaks slower when she says, “We think the butterfly might mean death now.”

“And the thing is, we’re getting closer to seeing her,” Dana says, and the way the two of them are talking feels like a moving vehicle, growing faster, speeding up. “The goddess. We always thought she might be like, a concept, you know, and just represented by the deer, but now we’re all getting flashes of, like- what seems like a person-”

She keeps talking, but Juliet starts speaking over her. “And like, there’s this weird presence now that wasn’t there before, like, it’s as though there are these moments in our visions where there are gaps, like, like, I don’t know, you’ll be dreaming about having a conversation with someone but it’s like there’s supposed to be someone else there, but there’s not-”

“-but the thing is, there’s this whole other element to it, because we think the mortal beloved-”

It’s that phrase again, _mortal beloved_ , that gets Chloe to hit the brakes on this spiraling mess of a conversation. “Did Rachel send you here to talk to me?”

That shuts them both up, and they blink at her, and they do look surprised but they don’t look that guilty.

“Um,” Dana says. “Not… exactly.”

That sounds a lot like yes. Chloe crosses her arms. “Uh huh.”

“It’s just,” Juliet pipes up, looking worriedly between Chloe and Dana and back to Chloe again. “It’s just! We’ve realized that people from Blackwell- who are eighteen or nineteen are having the strongest visions, so the priestesses wanted to ask everyone in that- group- to come by the church later today, so we could discuss what visions-”

“I’m not having any visions,” Chloe says. Even if she wanted to admit to them, there’s really no idea she can think of worse than sitting in a circle for Fucked by the Goddess Anonymous to share feelings and hallucinations with complete strangers.

Raising both her hands, a gesture of peace, Dana begins, calmly, “That could be true, but maybe you’re having them without real-”

“Then why are you and Rachel avoiding each other?” Juliet says, absolutely blunt. “No one’s even allowed to talk about you at church meetings now, it’s got to have something to do with the goddess.”

Rachel doesn’t want anyone to even talk about Chloe.

It’s like Chloe been punched. Underneath the counter so the girls won’t see, she grabs at one of the slats to steady herself, takes one, two deep breaths. Then, without looking up, she says, “Thanks for the invite. I’ll pass.”

Dana is halfway through fiercely whispering “ _Juliet_!” when Chloe says so, and immediately looks up, apologetic but determined. “Chloe, that was so rude and I’m so sorry, but it’s really important that-”

“Listen,” Chloe says, and she’s able to take her hand back now but she still feels as though she can’t breathe, “you will have to tie me to the back of your car and drag me all the way to that fucking warehouse if you want me to go so badly. There’s not a chance in hell I’m going by choice.”

After that, Dana and Juliet seem to decide their food is to-go.

Chloe hears “nice going, Juliet,” and “it’s not _my_ fault that-” before the chimes jangle and the door swings shut, and as soon as it does she sags back against the counter. 

She spends at least fifteen minutes just looking at Rachel’s number in her phone, nearly texts her seven separate and equally embarrassing messages, and then spends another five minutes splashing water in her face.

\---

She dreams about the storm that night.

It’s a brief dream. She’s on the beach, and the tornado is right in front of her eyes. She can feel the whip-sting of wind against her skin. Someone is with her, someone she can’t see. 

“I hope it was worth it,” she hears herself say.

She doesn’t wake up bleeding this time, but her throat is very tight. 

\---

Two days after that, she’s scarfing down breakfast at home, trying as usual to get out as fast as possible, when Joyce says offhandedly from the kitchen, “Oh, look, Chloe, a butterfly.”

Chloe drops her fork. When she looks up, Joyce’s attention has already returned to the stove, eyes no longer on Chloe or on the alleged butterfly, so she doesn’t notice the way Chloe turns around, tremulously slow, in her seat to look at the windowsill.

There is a butterfly there. It’s perched gently on the very edge of the sill, wings fluttering delicately in the light breeze from outside.. 

It’s blue. 

The shaky exhale that comes rushing out of Chloe is uncontrollable, if not unjustified. Hurriedly she shoves the rest of the bacon into her mouth, stands up to dump the remains into the trash, and sets the plate down in the sink, crossing Joyce to pick up her wallet from the table again.

The butterfly hasn’t flown away. It’s just sitting there. Chloe doesn’t even fucking know if butterflies have eyes, but it feels like it’s watching her. 

Joyce isn’t looking.

Carefully, quietly and quickly, Chloe brings it one palm down on the windowsill and crushes the bug under her hand. 

The slimy feeling it leaves on her hand makes her nauseous, but there’s a sort of vindictive triumph in doing it too. At least she knows she’s still petty.

She’s rubbing the corpse of it off her palm onto her jeans when she looks up and David’s staring at her. 

He must’ve come out of the garage, creepy and quiet the way she especially hates, and now he’s just looking at her. There’s a small tilt to his eyebrow that tells her he saw her kill the thing, but what he’s thinking about it is harder to discern. 

They hold gazes for an extended moment. Then Chloe lifts her chin, just slightly, curls her fist, and leaves. 

\---

On the thirteenth day of Chloe being completely alone, Kate Marsh comes by the Two Whales.

She comes up and sits at the counter, where Chloe is hurrying back and forth between four grumpy middle-aged men, and smiles benignly when Chloe stops in front of her, panting and shocked. “Kate?”

“Hi, Chloe,” she says. Kate really has such a nice voice. “It’s been a while.”

“It has been,” Chloe agrees, blinking, then a little more sourly, “it seems most goddess worshippers have sworn this place off.”

Kate just giggles at that. “That’s not true,” she says. “And even if it was, it’s not so bad to have a place where you can take a break from the goddess for a while. It gets kind of heavy sometimes.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like blind worship. Chloe stares at her, and for a lack of better things to say ends up with, “So what can I get for you?”

“Tea, please,” Kate says. “Chamomile, if you have it.”

She looks so small in between the shoulders of all these grown ass men at the counter that Chloe hurries back with her drink, lingers to talk to her. “So you’re not here on official goddess business?”

Looking amused, Kate just shakes her head, blowing against the cup and sending ripples across the water. “Nope.”

“Rachel didn’t send you to check up on me?”

At that, Kate’s smile fades, and she puts her cup down to look Chloe in the eye. “Rachel didn’t send me anywhere,” she says. “All she’s said to me is that you two had an argument, and she wants to give you space.” Taking a quick sip of tea, she continues, “She misses you, Chloe. It’s obvious.”

If Rachel really missed her, then she would have fucking texted Chloe by now. But she knows Kate is telling the truth, so she eases up. “So you’re not here to grill me about what I know about the goddess.”

Grinning, Kate shakes her head. “I wouldn’t be the best choice to send out for grilling people,” she says. “Anyway, Chloe, the goddess thing. It’s about a relationship between you and her. It’s private. You don’t have to tell anybody what you see.” 

Good, because she won’t. But hearing so relaxes her, and she leans down against the counter so she and Kate are level. “Okay. Sorry about… being a bitch about it.”

“You’re fine,” Kate says, smiling at her like she really means it, and Chloe supposes she ought to start being cordial.

“So,” she says. “So, the goddess thing not going so hot lately, then?”

Brow crinkling a little, Kate says, “I mean, no. But it’s okay if you’re not interested.”

“I’m not interested in _joining_ , doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what’s making everyone so miserable lately. Tell me.”

So Kate puts her cup down again, giving Chloe an unsure look before opening her mouth. “We think something happened with the goddess,” she says. 

Chloe nods, urging her on, and Kate takes a deep breath and continues. “When we all came in that day, a couple of weeks ago… the dreams started changing. Our visions are different now. They’re all kind of… spooky. Dangerous, like. And I know you heard some things from Dana and Juliet, but- it’s like she’s becoming clearer to us. Still blurry, but- there’s a person shape that wasn’t there before. She’s becoming more than just the deer. And like, this combination of seeing something like a person, and seeing death all the time-” Kate chuckles, but she doesn’t sound pleased. “It’s like she’s turning into a ghost story.”

“I don’t like ghost stories,” Chloe says.

Instead of retorting or smirking like another goddess girl might have done, Kate just sighs, cupping her hands around her cup again. “None of us do,” she says. “It means someone’s dead.”

_Someone’s dead_. “Kate, doesn’t the death thing freak you out?” Chloe says, crossing her arms over the counter and leaning forward, quietly desperate for Kate to say yes. “Like, ever? You guys are seeing all this horrible shit, and you know it’s related to her, and you’re all still acting like she’s-”

She has to cut herself off before she says something possibly very offensive, and she flails for a moment for more words before shutting her mouth slow. Kate’s frowning now, not at Chloe but at the steam rising in front of her face.

“It does freak us out,” she says. Her brow is creased, knuckles jutting out where her fingers are curled tight around her cup. “It freaks me out a lot. And I think it freaks Rachel out the most, even if she never says. But seeing death is new, Chloe. Our visions aren’t all like that. We need to know how it’s all connected.” She meets Chloe’s eyes again, solemn and sincere. “The only thing we know for sure is that we _aren’t_ dead. And it could be thanks to her that we aren’t.”

It’s probably true that being dead is worse than being alive and seeing it coming for you, but Chloe doesn’t have the experience to argue both sides. “Not dead yet. What if your visions or whatever are of the future?”

Kate looks down at her tea again, smiling tolerantly as she brings the mug to her lips. “Well, then maybe she’s trying to warn us.”

“Or maybe she’s trying to threaten you.”

The cup lingers at Kate’s mouth, and there’s a thick moment of silence between where she lowers it and when she swallows. Then she meets Chloe’s eyes again. “I know the goddess can seem ominous,” she says. “But she is good, Chloe. I know that.”

All Chloe wants to ask is _how, how can you know, how can you be sure, how can she possibly be good_ , but before she can even open her mouth, Joe Mulligan barks from the end of the counter, “Chloe, Joyce pay you to flirt on the job? I need a refill!”

Chloe stands up straight again. “Some people can flirt without having to pay for it, Joe, but I doubt it’s anyone you’d know-”

Unfortunately, by the time the arguing and jeering has died down and Chloe’s refilled five mugs and broken Joe’s accidentally-on-purpose, Kate has finished her tea and left, leaving a generous tip and more questions in her wake. 

\---

The dream she has that night is different from the others.

She’s still lying in bed, but the slow, languid movement of sunlight over sheets and the lack of birds chirping is enough to tell her that this isn’t reality. For a moment she’s just lying there, and nothing bad is happening.

“You gotta rest every once in a while, baby girl,” says a voice she knows, achingly close and too far away.

Chloe sits up on her elbows, her movements somehow more defined, more solid, than dream movement ought to be. Her father doesn’t move from where he’s standing at the foot of her bed, just stares at her, smiling that fond little smile he always wore when she was a child. 

Her voice cracks when she says, “Dad?”

“She couldn’t have saved him,” says a voice to her right, suddenly, and when Chloe looks, Rachel is lying on the left side of the bed, lounging and heavy lidded. She’s on her side, facing Chloe, one folded arm pillowing her head as she gazes up. “She did try, though.”

For a long moment, Chloe just stares at Rachel, at the long-legged and lazy way of her. This is too real to be easily defined as a dream, now, because Rachel has been here a million times, has laid on her side and looked up at Chloe like this a million times. It’s familiar. It’s enough to ease the sense of dread.

When Chloe looks back up towards the door, her father is gone.

She lays back down on her own side, facing Rachel this time, her own forearm coming to fold under her head. They lay there, mirroring each other, just looking. It’s peaceful.

“I’ve never understood you,” Chloe whispers.

That just makes Rachel smile, and her free hand comes up to stroke past Chloe’s hair, fingertips settling in a soft clasp over her ear. “Do you miss me?”

“You’re not dead,” Chloe says. “You’re not.”

Rachel keeps smiling, but it grows sad. She flattens her fingers against the side of Chloe’s head, and her hand is cold. “Missing someone doesn’t have to mean they’re dead,” she says. “You should know that better than anyone, Chloe.”

This isn’t the first time Chloe has had this dream. 

She leans in to kiss Rachel, and because this isn’t real Rachel leans in too. There’s a small moment where their lips touch. Chloe knows it’s not as good as it could be if she wasn’t dreaming. 

When she pulls away, Rachel’s gone.

Max from the diner is in her place, laying on her back, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t want to get stuck in time,” she says. 

As usual, when Chloe startles awake, her face is damp. But when she goes to smear the blood away, saltwater comes back on her fingertips. 

\---

When Chloe comes to work that day, it’s without a headache or even a sore nose, which is fortunate, because it happens to be the same day Victoria Chase comes into the Two Whales for the first time ever.

She’s sitting in a booth, carefully not touching the table, arms and legs crossed tightly and leaning back against the wood. Chloe’s so flabbergasted to see her here, in her fucking cashmere sweater and diamond earrings and irritable expression, that she doesn’t notice Joyce poking her with a writing pad until she’s whapped in the head with it. “Ow! Hey!”

“Tabletop duty for you today, missy,” Joyce says, and is walking away when Chloe hesitates, still looking at Victoria. 

The last thing she wants to do is deal with Victoria Chase at this shitty time in her life. “Mom-”

Joyce turns, but she’s distracted already, a receipt in her left hand and two pens in her right. “Hmm?”

After another second of indecision, Chloe decides as much as she hates this, she’s too old to shunt off unpleasant teen girls to her mother. “No, never mind. It’s nothing.”

She takes her sweet time approaching Victoria’s booth though. “Never thought I’d see the day the queen came to our plebian establishment. What are you here for?”

Ignoring her comment but acknowledging her presence, Victoria doesn’t look at her, just wrinkles her nose and extends one careful index finger to trace lightly over the image of a butterfly, carved precisely into the cracked plastic of the table. “Who put this here?”

As far as Chloe knows, the carving wasn’t there yesterday. Trying to stamp down the brief wave of nausea the picture of it elicits so Victoria doesn’t smell her weakness, she does her best to say, casually, “Someone whose ass I’m going to ream for defacing private property.”

“It’s fucking unappetizing,” Victoria says dispassionately, leaning back again and recrossing her arms. “There’s a fine line between homey and unmanaged, you know.”

“I’ll say it again,” Chloe says, putting the coffee pot down on the table and crossing her own arms. “What the fuck do you want?”

Victoria has her backpack with her. She looks up at Chloe, quick and sharp, then away, back down at the table. “I need to talk to you.”

Chloe does her best to keep her moment of complete shock and confusion brief, and tries to keep her, “No thanks,” as flat as possible. “Unless you’re ordering, no interest.”

The roll of Victoria’s eyes is practiced, slow, perfect. “Somehow I thought you might say that,” she says, and then reaches into one pocket of her impossibly tight jeans, retrieves a neatly folded bill, and presses it down on the table. “Let’s talk.”

It’s a hundred dollars.

What the fuck.

Victoria’s just looking at her now, and she still looks irritated and weirdly determined but there’s this satisfied lilt to her mouth now, like she knows she has the upper hand.

Chloe’s not that easy. She does her best to glare at Victoria and not at the hundred dollar bill (holy fuck) pressed flat and uncreased on the tabletop. “I’m not a fucking hooker.”

The way Victoria smiles is so sharp and unamused that for a moment she almost loses her prettiness and just becomes terrifying. “I think if I had another hundred you might be.” 

For a moment, Chloe’s just frozen, aghast. Her mind wheels desperately, thinking of something equally biting to say back, but her tongue’s gone numb and her brain has gone blank and so the best she can do is turn on her heel and walk away. 

She hears Victoria mutter, “fuck,” then raise her voice. “Price, Jesus, learn to take a joke. Get back here.”

“Not interested,” Chloe snarls, without turning back around. “Figure out a new way to make friends.” 

There’s an infinitesimally small moment of silence. Then Victoria’s voice is loud when she says, “I know you’re connected to the goddess.”

Victoria Chase has the kind of voice that cuts right through a conversation, and at least half of the diner patrons go silent when she speaks. Some of the men at the counter look over at her. More look at Chloe.

Chloe’s frozen in place, white-knuckled across the coffee pot, and when she looks at Joyce, she doesn’t seem to have noticed, still absently flipping pancakes on the griddle. Briefly she debates the pros and cons of just continuing to ignore Victoria, then she grits her teeth, turns on her heel, and walks back to the booth.

Victoria’s full-on smirking now, because she’s a bitch. Chloe sets the coffee pot down so she can ball both her hands into fists. “Could you have said that a little louder? I don’t think the fucking fishermen heard you.”

“As if I’m the one making it obvious,” Victoria sniffs, still looking self-satisfied. “You’ve been avoiding Amber for two weeks and walking around like someone’s breathing down your neck for just as long. I’m only saying what everyone else knows.”

_Everyone else knows_. Everyone else knows that the goddess has some kind of grip on Chloe’s head, has been rifling through her dreams and thoughts with her butterfly-death hands. Chloe feels like she’s going to throw up. 

She swallows it down, though, and takes the hundred dollar bill off the table and puts it in her apron before Victoria can retract it. “The only person breathing down my neck right now is you. What do you even want to talk about?”

Here Victoria pauses, smirk fading, and looks away from her again. Chloe’s about to ask what’s fucking wrong with her when she says, “I’m leaving the church.”

Chloe’d forgotten she was even in the church to begin with. “What- so?”

Now Victoria looks back at her, glaring. “So. I’m taking all my shit with me. All the visions and writings and drawings, they don’t get to have it anymore.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Chloe says, and if this goes on any longer her fury at this whole situation is going to be outweighed by straight up confusion. “I’m not fucking involved with the church. At all.”

“Right,” Victoria says. “Because you hate her. The goddess. You don’t think she’s a fucking angel, like the others do. All she does is show you awful shit and take people away from you and you’re not interested in worshipping her when all she’s done is ruin things.”

That shuts Chloe the fuck up for a solid minute and a half. Victoria holds her gaze, hard and unforgiving, the whole time, not bothering to search Chloe’s face the way Chloe’s searching hers, because she already knows she’s right. 

Finally, when Chloe doesn’t speak, she just sighs, annoyed, and pushes her bangs out of her face. “That’s the reason I’m leaving the church.”

And that makes sense, Chloe gets it, she knows from what Rachel and David have told her that the goddess has fucked with Victoria too. Still, “I really don’t feel like bonding with you over this.”

“I didn’t come here to bond with you,” Victoria snaps, “don’t flatter yourself,” and leans across the booth. She rustles around in her bag for a minute, then withdraws a small, square journal, with clean-cut edges and a thin crack down its spine. She puts it on the table where the hundred dollar bill was. “Take this.”

It looks vaguely familiar, but Chloe doesn’t have the patience to rack her memory for Victoria’s sake. “What is it.”

“My…” Victoria’s lip curls. “The journal they had me keep. To write down visions and dreams and things like that. I don’t need it anymore, I’m giving it to you.”

“I don’t want it,” Chloe says shortly. 

“Do I look like I give a shit what you want?” Victoria snaps, then leans back against the booth and sighs. “Listen, it’s not like I’m going to fucking burn it, I spend too much time on the damn thing to put it to waste. But I’m not going to give Amber the satisfaction of having it either.”

The journal sits heavy on the table, and Chloe eyes it again, this time with more wariness. “Then why give it to me?” she says. “I just told you, I have no interest in getting involved with this shit now or ever. Also, I still think you’re a fucking bitch.” 

“I know,” Victoria says, with so much stretched patience in her voice that Chloe wants to just throttle her, Joyce’s customer-service-training be damned. “That’s why I’m giving it to you. I don’t want it in the hands of any of those moony-eyed naive priestess girls. You and I are the only ones who know the goddess is bad shit. I don’t want anything more to do with worshipping her, trying to figure her out, anything. You keep the fucking journal.”

She stands up, pushing away from the booth and shouldering past Chloe, and just because Chloe hates not having the last word, especially in situations like this, without looking away from the journal she calls, “How do you know I won’t just burn it?”

The silence before Victoria’s answer is long enough that Chloe looks up and away from the journal, turns to make sure Victoria hasn’t already left. But she hasn’t, and she’s standing in front of the diner’s door dividers, just looking at Chloe.

Her expression isn’t sharp, or mean, or even contemptuous. It’s just kind of… pitying. It takes Chloe aback, the derision going out of her. 

“You might act all tough, Chloe,” Victoria says, “but I know you’re scared of her too.”

And then she’s gone. 

The journal is still sitting there. After debating the good it could possibly do her to look, tentatively she picks it up, opens it to a page in the middle.

It’s a drawing- not a pinnacle of artistic talent or anything, but legible. It’s of the side of a chair- the perspective is weird, like the sketch been drawn by lying flat on one side to look up at the furniture.

There’s someone sitting in the chair, someone with thin legs and shackled wrists. Their face is cut off by the top of the page, just the suggestion of hair hanging by the neck suggesting that there is a head. 

The hands are flexed, like the person’s struggling, and the whiteness and hard black lines of the page is unsettlingly familiar. 

Chloe snaps the journal shut, takes a deep breath, and when she leaves for her break she tosses it into the passenger seat and doesn’t look at it again. 

\---

She goes to the junkyard to smoke during her break, because it’s wide open and she hasn’t been in long enough that maybe the idea of Rachel’s corpse won’t haunt her, at least for a little bit. She doesn’t immediately vomit when she gets out of her car and smells rust, so that’s an improvement.

Before she lights up, though, she stops briefly inside her and Rachel’s place, even though it’s probably a bad idea. It’s been mostly desolate since Rachel became a goddess girl, but it’s not like the walls are dusty- they’ve both come here on their own and together often enough.

_Rachel was here_.

_Chloe was here_.

When Chloe inspects the place, it seems pretty unchanged from the last time she was here, bottles and papers and magazines still strewn haphazardly everywhere. The bracelets that are now too small for their wrists are still wound around a pipe. The photobooth pictures of them are still on the bench.

It’s only when she’s about to leave when she notices the two crumpled pieces of paper near the trash can.

For a moment, she debates even touching them. But she can’t not. She stoops down, unfolds both of them, reads the messy blue pen lines of Rachel’s handwriting.

Paper number one: _C, I don’t know how to explain this to you, but I know that you’re_ \- 

Paper number two: _C- Fuck, Chloe, why are we both making this so hard? I never thought that you would be_ -

And that’s it.

That’s all Rachel thought of saying to her.

Chloe leaves the papers crumpled at the corner of the garbage and goes to find the most stable-looking wrecked car to lay down and smoke on.

Even getting high for about fifteen minutes doesn’t help anything.

_Chloe, why are you making this so hard_? 

Not _Chloe, I miss you_. Not _Chloe, I’m worried about you_. 

The junkyard was a bad idea from the start. Chloe sits up on the hood of the car, rubs her joint out, and is about to run a hand through her hair when she sees.

There’s a deer staring at her about five yards away, ears twitching, eyes big and full and fixed on Chloe.

Maybe it’s because she’s high, but it doesn’t startle her as much as it probably should. Instead, she just lays on her back again. “Hey,” she says. “I was wondering if you were ever gonna show up in real life. Since the goddess and I are connected, or whatever.”

The deer doesn’t say anything, because it’s a fucking deer. 

“Or are you the goddess?” Chloe muses, still without looking at the damn thing. “It was always kind of unclear to me. Not that I was paying attention ever. I never wanted you to be a part of my fucking life, but here we are anyway, I guess. So what do you want?”

She props herself up onto her elbows, and the deer’s still just standing there looking at her. It blinks once, twice, and its ears flop, but it stays where it is. 

“I’m not like Rachel,” Chloe says. “I don’t want to know who you are. I want you to leave me alone.”

But the deer just stays there.

So she gets onto her feet, a little unsteadily, leaning with one hand against the truck’s hood. “I said, leave me the fuck alone! Go away! I’m not going to be a part of your stupid fucking game!”

If it was a regular deer, it probably would have run off when she started yelling, but it hasn’t. It’s still just looking at her, like it’s waiting.

A little wildly, Chloe reaches around for a bottle, a loose shard of metal, some projectile, and when she doesn’t find anything she reaches down and pulls her own left shoe off, hurls it at the deer. She misses by about a foot. It doesn’t even twitch. “Go away! I fucking hate you! You’re ruining my fucking life! You ruin everything!”

She has to reach down to loosen the right boot, which at least allows her to look away from the deer, but when she looks up with it in hand it’s still just there, looking at her. Her vision are beginning to blur with tears, for some stupid reason, and it’s putting the deer in kaleidoscope vision. “You fucking- took everything- you took her away from me! She got obsessed with you and you took over her life and you ruined- she was fucking all I had! She was all I fucking had, you son of a bitch! Give her back!”

It’s Rachel she means, the way the words are spilling out of her she has to mean Rachel, but for a split second something vague and indiscernible flashes across her train of thought, some kind of other meaning in what she’s saying. Chloe goes still, shoe still held aloft in her left hand. 

Then she just gets more incensed, at the idea that this goddess is infiltrating her mind and her thoughts and making Chloe lose meaning in her own words. What she says should be _hers_ , her thoughts need to be _hers_. She throws the other shoe at the deer. “Give her back! Give her back to me!”

This time she misses by about four feet. She loses her balance with the violent swing of her arm and collapses hard onto her ass, head knocking against the car fender. The impact knocks some tears out of her eyes, and with that she’s fully crying, curling up into herself and burying her sobs into her kneecaps, furious and sad and desperately alone. 

However long she spends crying like that, when she looks up the deer is gone, and her shoes are scattered against the dirt untouched. 

\---

She doesn’t put them back on. She drives all the way to the beach in her socks, boots thrown haphazard and dusty near the brakes. 

The sun’s going down, turning red and heavy, and the sunset is always prettiest over the ocean. It’s not like she really wants to go look at it by herself, because isn’t that just the saddest, loneliest fucking thing imaginable, but she can’t go back to the diner and she can’t go back home and she can’t go back to Rachel so she has to go somewhere.

Chloe hates this, the fact that she’s becoming someone who goes to watch the sunset alone.

Once she parks, she peels off her socks too, chucks them down to join her boots, and climbs out. The sand is cool and gritty in the autumn air, and it feels good between her toes, comfortable.

It’s only when she comes closer to the slow-crashing wavefront that she realizes that the beach is only mostly deserted.

There’s someone down at the water, walking in a small, straight line through the water, kicking up at the tide as it passes over her bare feet. She’s by herself too, as far as Chloe can tell, but it doesn’t seem to faze her the way it’s fazing Chloe. Instead, she just keeps pacing back and forth, in that same straight line, disturbing the water gently like she has nothing greater to do, has nothing else to preoccupy her thoughts.

Chloe’s watched her for nearly two full minutes before she realizes that she’s walking towards her. It’s another two before she realizes it’s Max, from the diner. 

Two weeks of absence, and Max from the diner is here again, here in real life.

She seems almost dreamlike, in the light and in the lightness of her movement, like something natural and rare. Her jeans are rolled up to mid-calf, and her arms and ankles are bare and speckled with saltwater and glistening gold in the sunset. Every time she kicks up, even just slightly, there’s a rainbow spray of water in a near-perfect arc in front of her.

There’s something so timeless about the way she looks.

It’s such a delicate moment that even Chloe doesn’t have the brazenness to interrupt her. Instead she just hangs back a yard or two away, watching, for what’s probably an inappropriate length of time, until suddenly Max looks up, one leg still extended from a kick, and meets her eyes. 

Chloe goes still under her gaze, feeling weirdly guilty, like she’s intruded on something private, but Max just smiles gently at her, turns carefully on her other heel, and goes kicking back down the same expanse of tide and sand again. “Hi, Chloe.”

“Hi,” Chloe says, a little dazedly. Not really knowing what to say, she ends up with just, “I didn’t think… um. I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Even though she’s facing away from Chloe now, she can still see enough of Max’s face to see her smile a very small smile. “Likewise,” she says. “I’m glad I get to see you again, though.”

She’s one second away from saying _why_ , but then decides that’s too much angst to dump on a complete stranger. Instead she says, after another long, quiet moment of watching Max, “I used to do this when I was a kid. Just come down here in the fall with my mom and dad and kick at the waves.”

It’s such a naked thing to say that she shocks herself by letting it come out of her mouth, and nearly regrets it, feels her cheeks go a little warm when Max turns on her heel to turn and face Chloe again. There are so many things she’d thought of saying to Max, if she ever saw her again, about the junkyard or about dreams or about the sad look in Max’s eyes. Still, though, it’s such a relief to talk to someone about something that’s not a mystery, after nearly two weeks of silence or arguments or goddess talk, that she doesn’t take it back. 

Then Max smiles, really genuinely, and it kind of takes Chloe’s breath away a little. She meets Chloe’s eyes for a moment, then ducks her head down again, arms spread out wide like she’s balancing, and goes splashing back in Chloe’s direction again, this time in smaller arcs so the water doesn’t hit Chloe. “I remember,” she says, and for a moment there’s a pause and it’s like she means she remembers what Chloe’s talking about. Then she continues, “I would come here sometimes and do the same thing when I was a kid. With my parents, and my best friend and her family. Even though the water’s so cold here.” She huffs a little through her nose, sounding half-amused. “I’d forgotten how cold it was.”

The tide comes rolling up a little further, just meets the tips of Chloe’s toes. Max is right and it is cold. She stays where she is anyway. “I forgot you were from Arcadia Bay. You here to visit your friend, then?”

Briefly Max loses the grace in her movement; it’s small, the slightest wobble in the foot that’s still planted in the ground, but Chloe notices it anyway. Then Max turns again, face once again concealed. “She wouldn’t remember me.”

The way she says it is as light as anything else, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s sad. There’s a slight ache in Chloe’s chest, but whether it’s for sympathy or empathy she can’t quite tell yet. The tide rolls up higher, wets the cuff of her jeans this time. “Come on. How do you know for sure?”

The little arcs of water are becoming more and more concentrated as Max brings them into the air, and Max’s paces are becoming smaller and smaller. There’s still a smile on her face, but it’s wistful and distant and she still isn’t looking at Chloe. “It’s just that… we’re different people now than we were before.” She shakes her head a little, and it lets Chloe get a better glimpse of her face; her expression is tight suddenly, as if she’s holding something back. “Besides, eventually you have to let go of what’s gone.”

There’s really nothing to be said to that, and Chloe’s not sure if she agrees or disagrees anyway. So she just keeps looking at Max instead, at where her bones are visible underneath her skin, where water has caught against her arms and ankles, at the way her fingers splay as she holds her arms aloft. 

She wonders what kind of person Max is, really. She’s mysterious, but not in the same way Rachel is, more soft-edged and hazy and fragile. There’s something soft in the way she holds herself, vulnerable and curious, and Chloe wonders if Max has secrets or if she just is one. 

The sun is growing heavy in the sky, scarlet and dark. Chloe can’t tear her eyes away from the still-rising thin arcs of jettisoned water, from the pale slope of Max’s foot. “How much longer are you in town for?” she says absently. 

Max frowns, and her foot comes back down from its extension to settle against the other, somehow without leaving a mark in the sand. “I don’t know,” she says, sounding worried by her own uncertainty. “Not long, I think. I’ve already stayed longer than I meant to.”

Waves are crashing in earnest over Chloe’s feet now, biting and numbing and soaking into the denim of her pants, but she stays where she is anyway. “What’s been keeping you?”

“I’m kind of stuck,” Max says, and she’s completely grounded now, hands curled by her sides and staring down at the salt-shiny earth below. “When I came I thought it would be easy to leave, but… I miscalculated some things.” She’s still frowning. “But I can’t stay. I shouldn’t have been here as long as I have.”

There’s something about the way she says it that makes Chloe think she’s not supposed to ask why. So she doesn’t. She just keeps looking at the way Max is frowning, frowning down at her own body. 

She wishes for once she could see what Max looks like genuinely happy.

“I could-” she starts, and Max’s gaze snaps onto her, disrupting her thought. She blinks back at Max’s gaze for a moment, swallows, then starts again. “If you want, I could. If you’re stuck in town, I could drive you back home.”

Max just stares at her, lips parting slightly in surprise, and Chloe immediately regrets saying so. This probably isn’t a normal person thing to do, offer a total stranger a drive home in her car, now Max probably thinks she’s the weird and creepy one, a stalker maybe, a sex criminal-

“You’d really do that?” Max says.

Surprised out of her reverie, Chloe looks up at her again. Max is still looking at her in unadulterated shock, but there’s something in her face now that’s more vulnerable than shock, something soft and hopeful. 

The regret fades. “Yeah, if you want. No one should be stuck in this shit town.”

For a moment it looks like Max might say yes. Then she hesitates. “It’s so far from here. I don’t think-”

“I have money,” Chloe says instantly. “And time.”

In the back of her head, there’s at least two warning bells going off, telling her that this is absolutely a bad idea. Joyce would go nuts. She’s probably lose her chance of getting Rachel back forever.

But, on the other hand, she wouldn’t be alone anymore. 

As though she’s read her mind, though, Max finally looks away from Chloe, back down at the sand. “Chloe, it’s so amazing of you to offer,” she says. “It really, really is. But I… I think people would miss you.”

Whatever had been hopeful about this moment is gone, snuffed out. Max is saying no too.

“Yeah?” Chloe says, feeling sharp and prickly again, especially when Max won’t just fucking look at her. What does she have to feel guilty about, she and Chloe are _strangers_. “Like who?”

“Like your mom,” Max says, still looking at the ground. “And Rachel.”

There’s a pause, and Max just keeps looking down at the sand while Chloe is silent, hands digging deeper into her pockets.

“Where are they, Max?” she says finally. “They’re not fucking here. I’m here, and you’re here, and that’s it.”

That’s what gets Max to look at her again, only a little startled but a lot sad. Chloe hates this, hates that she only ever sees Max look like this when she has such a nice face. Still, she doesn’t say so, just glares at her, in defense.

Max just shakes her head. “Chloe, I know you’re lonely,” she says, in such a heavy way that it seems like she really _knows_ it, feels Chloe’s loneliness deep in her own bones. “But I wanted to tell you that-”

“How do you _know_ that?” Chloe interrupts, impatient and increasingly frustrated that people who aren’t her keep claiming to know how she’s feeling.

But it doesn’t even faze Max to be asked. She just gives Chloe a wry smile. “You’re here, and that’s it.”

Even though she looks away again after she’s said so, Chloe keeps watching her face, the careful precision of her expression, how she’s still smiling but still never seems to be happy when she does. Looking carefully for some twitch of emotion, Chloe says, “You are too.”

Something flickers through Max’s eyes, so fast that Chloe doesn’t have time to catch it, but at least she knows it was there. Then Max looks up, and smiles with her whole face, with her eyes, as if she’s trying her best to show Chloe she’s not hiding anything. 

The sunset is painting one half of her body orange, and the other half is in shadow, and Chloe thinks briefly that she’s never seen any person look less than a person and more like a poem than Max. 

“Maybe the reason I’m here is so _you_ won’t be alone,” Max says quietly, but just loud enough that the sea doesn’t wash the words away.. “Because Chloe, I know you feel like you are sometimes, but you’re not, not ever.” Her eyes are sort of smouldering, intense and magnetic, and it’s hard to keep meeting them but it would be even harder to look away. “You’re never alone.”

Water spreads over their toes. Max won’t stop looking at her.

Chloe’s throat is dry, and she’s hoarse when she says, “Why are you-”

“Chloe!”

She jumps, and spins around, sand going flying in a circle, and there’s a figure in sunset shadow running down the beach towards her, jogging like it’s urgent.

Only when they’re like ten feet away and there’s a flash of gold hair does Chloe realize, belatedly, that it’s Rachel. Her eyes go wide. “Rach-”

“Chloe!” is all the warning she gets before Rachel throws her arms hard around Chloe’s neck, hugging her with a force Chloe couldn’t match even if she tried. “God, I’ve been looking for you all day! Joyce is worried sick, you know, I went by the diner to try to find you and she said you didn’t come back from break and I was like-”

Rachel smells like her pomegranate shampoo and like smoke and like herself, and for a second Chloe doesn’t even dare touch her. But she does, she has to, she takes Rachel by the shoulders and pulls away and holds her there so she can look at her face. “Rachel, what are you doing here?”

The relief in Rachel’s face fades into something Chloe doesn’t dare label as guilt. “Chloe, I’m so sorry,” she says. “Avoiding each other like this for two weeks- it was childish and awful. I wanted to give you space, but- I should’ve called, or something. I’m really, really sorry.”

This isn’t a dream. Rachel’s really here again. Chloe just blinks at her, but Rachel lets her, stays still and warm under where Chloe is clutching her shoulders. 

Finally, she manages, “What are you sorry for?”

Surprisingly, Rachel fidgets, and looks down at the sand. “For not coming to see you, and. For what happened at the junkyard. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that. It’s your business, what you- it’s your business.” She looks up at Chloe again. “You don’t have to tell me anything about what you see. It’s not mine to know.”

She doesn’t have to tell Rachel. She doesn’t have to tell Rachel, and Rachel will still be her friend anyway.

The shaking breath that comes out of her is embarrassing, and so is the way she drags Rachel back into her, digging her hands into her shoulder blades and inhaling her scent. But Rachel doesn’t make fun of her, just squeezes her back.

Chloe thinks later that maybe Rachel let her off the hook too easily, or she didn’t ask enough of why Rachel didn’t reach out, but. It’s been a long time for both of them. It’s been too long.

“Chloe, will you make a deal with me?” Rachel murmurs. Her nose is buried in Chloe’s throat, and her knees are probably cramping but she doesn’t complain, just hang on tight to Chloe’s ribs. 

The answer is yes, always, but Chloe mumbles, “Depends on the deal,” anyways.

Rachel just laughs, hot puffs of air that lift the hair off Chloe’s neck. “It’s September, right?” she says. “So three more months, ish. Three more months to give me time to figure out the goddess. You don’t have to help me. And then if… if by the end of the year, I still don’t get it, I still don’t have her, we’ll go to Los Angeles together.”

Three months.

That’s almost nothing.

Chloe holds her out again, still without letting go of her. “You’re sure?” she says. “I mean. I know how important this is to you.”

“Not more important than you are,” Rachel says, and it’s determined and genuine and exactly the right thing to say, exactly Rachel Amber. “Deal?”

It’s a struggle not to say, “Deal,” too fast, to betray overeagerness, when Chloe feels like she just might choke with relief. 

And that makes Rachel smile, and she’s so beautiful in the shadow of the sun, and she’s right here, pretty and alive and smiling at Chloe, and the goddess can’t touch them. Nothing can touch them. This is real and it can’t be taken away. 

It’s only when Rachel takes her hand and takes two steps back in the direction of the truck that Chloe remembers Max. She hangs back for a moment, and looks up and down the beach.

She’s gone, obviously, probably split when Rachel and Chloe started up on their mushy bullshit. But. There’s no footprints in the sand anywhere.

“What the fuck,” she mutters, and Rachel raises an eyebrow. “Rachel, you see where the girl from before went?”

Now both of Rachel’s eyebrows are raised. “What girl from before?” Then, suddenly gleeful, “Oh my god, were you here on a date?”

“No!” Chloe says, squeezing Rachel’s hand tighter. “I just… Max from the diner was here, I ran into her. But she disappeared again.”

Eyebrows coming down, tight to her eyes this time, Rachel looks around the beach too, then shrugs. “I mean, I didn’t see anyone.” Then she grins. “God, Chloe, this fuckin’ mystery girl of yours.”

“Shut up,” Chloe says, and lets Rachel lead her back to the lot this time. “Maybe she’s like… a mermaid or something.”

“Oh my god, shut up.”

Three more months.


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while! Thank you, thank you, thank you to Kaelin and Haaku for beta reading!!

Chloe tells herself they can go back to the way they were. 

For a while, it feels like they can, and so they do, they go to the beach and smoke in Chloe’s car and eat the diner into near bankruptcy every afternoon. 

True to her word, Rachel doesn’t bring up the goddess by name anymore, but she also doesn’t ask to go to the junkyard anymore either.

That’s all right, though. Chloe tries not to think too much about it. They have a lot to catch up on, after two weeks, that doesn’t involve dreams or blood or deer. 

“So how’s school going?” Chloe says, lining up what’s left of her blueberries into a neat military line. She and Rachel are three for three in catching catapulted fruit in their mouths, and if she tries for another strawberry Rachel’s going to kick her ass. “Assuming that school is still going.”

“It is, unfortunately,” Rachel says, cutting free a piece of Belgian waffle and taking a hearty bite out of it. “But it’s boring. Always the same thing, you know, even photography class is getting kind of weird, because of all of the, you know-” She does a vague handwaving motion both of them have started using to indicate goddess-related bullshit. Then she chews thoughtfully, swallows, then says, “Oh yeah! I think the new math teacher is in love with me.”

“You think everyone is in love with you,” Chloe says, and catches the half-strawberry Rachel flicks at her between her teeth.

Trying to frown at the loss of artillery but ending up just chuckling at Chloe’s seedy red grin, Rachel says, “That’s because everyone is.”

Probably. “So what’s the story, then?” Chloe says, rolling a bit of pancake dough into a ball between her fingers, smearing them with tiny streaks of chocolate. “There has to be a story.”

“So the story is,” Rachel says, then immediately gasps and lunges when Chloe tosses a blueberry at her. She catches it in her mouth anyway, but only by the skin of her teeth. “You fucking cheater! So the _story_ is, I haven’t passed in homework in weeks, right? Because I’m fucking busy with the church, everyone fucking knows I’m busy with the church, even my parents know I’m busy with the church. And yet no teacher will give me a break, right? They’re all like, it’s an extracurricular and you need to learn to balance your time, like shut up, you were at the church literally yesterday you fake-ass-”

She tosses another strawberry at Chloe, and this time Chloe misses, the fruit going careening across the floor and leaving a red streak on the floor behind it. Chloe tries not to look at it too long. “Dammit!” Scowling at Rachel’s triumphant, syrup-stained smirk, she continues, “All right, all right. Anyway, so why is he in love with you?” 

“Because,” Rachel says, taking in another mouthful of waffle, “in math, I have all my math homework grades at a hundred, when I have never in my life passed in a math assignment, because math is stupid and worthless. Also, I’ve caught him looking at my boobs.”

Chloe does her absolute best to not look at Rachel’s boobs, focusing instead on her blueberries. “I don’t know, Rach, could just be a coincidence.” 

Scoffing, Rachel begins, “Coinci-” Then she shrieks and goes gasping for the blueberry Chloe flings in her direction, misses spectacularly, and winces when it hits the customer in the booth behind her in the head.

After they both duck and hold while he glares behind him suspiciously, they straighten up and Rachel rolls her eyes and huffs, frowning poutily at Chloe’s satisfied smirk. Then she brightens up again, looking at Chloe with renewed interest, and Chloe stops chewing. “Anyway, enough about me. I want to know what’s new with you. Specifically, your mystery girl.”

Too much of a mystery to talk a lot about. Besides, she doesn’t want Rachel to get the wrong idea. Chloe just shrugs, shoves more pancake in her mouth. “Not much to say. I’ve only ever seen her a couple of times.”

Still, Rachel seems intrigued. “Her name’s Max, right? And she’s cute. That’s all I know, tell me more.”

“That’s all _I_ know, Rachel,” Chloe says, swallowing and meeting her eyes again. “She’s just kind of weird. She keeps showing up and then disappearing again, I don’t know what’s up with her. She told me she’s stuck in town, kind of, but I don’t really know what she means.”

Rachel gives a thoughtful little nod, mulling this over, then says, “Is she nice?”

Which is an un-Rachel-like question, but Chloe doesn’t question it, just shrugs and takes another bite. “Yeah, seems like it.”

“Do you like her?”

That gets Chloe to look up again, and when she meets Rachel’s eyes they’re sharp, searching in a way Chloe doesn’t quite understand. It makes her meal harder to swallow. It makes her look down at her plate again. “I don’t know her.”

There’s a moment of silence that she’s not entirely sure how to fill. 

Then a blueberry hits her in the head again. 

\---

But the truth is, they’re skating on pretty thin ice, and no amount of pretending is going to undo where the cracks are.

They’re at the lighthouse one day, smoking, and it’s not one of their usual hangout spots but it’s a fair enough alternative to the junkyard. Rachel’s chattering on about something, blithe and loose-limbed, and Chloe’s just leaning against the slats of the bench, enjoying the sound of her voice. 

The sun’s going down. 

“So I’m trying to convince this guy that the necklace is worth five dollars, right, and obviously it’s worth fifty _but_ it’s against the backdrop of this really creepy painting, so at first I’m like, maybe I can convince him it’s haunted and he’ll want to get rid of it or else he’ll get possessed. But then I really look at the painting, and it’s not a striking resemblance or anything but the woman wearing it does look kind of look a little like me, so I go, listen, mister, I think our meeting here today may have been _destiny_ -”

There’s a sudden, sharp pain across Chloe’s head, too fast and unexpected to locate its origin or trace the flash of thought that sometimes accompanies the ache, but she winces hard, leans forward onto her knees and presses her hand over her nose and closes her eyes.

The sun is soft orange behind her lids. 

A hand lands soft on her back, and it nearly startles her right off the bench, but when she looks up it’s just Rachel, of course it’s Rachel, looking at her with evident concern. “Chloe?” Then a sharp gasp. “You’re bleeding.”

That’s not surprising. Her hand is hot and damp, and when she holds it away from her face red drips onto her jeans. Quick, practiced, she rubs it away, closes her eyes against the pounding pain in her head that’s becoming more familiar by the day. “I’m okay.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Rachel’s frown set deeper into her face. “Is it because of-” She makes the hand gesture that means the goddess, vaguery that’s still too much for Chloe to look at head-on.

Chloe just nods, keeping to the theme of acknowledging without having to say it aloud. She wipes her hands on her jeans, touches her nose again, but the bleeding has slowed. It’ll stop soon. This one wasn’t so bad.

Rachel’s still watching her, so she has to say, “I’m fine, Rachel.” Then, when that doesn’t break Rachel’s gaze, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know,” Rachel says, and her voice is too light, “I’m not going to make you,” and she turns away again, takes another hit off her blunt as Chloe finishes rubbing the blood off her face. 

But even after the blood’s gone, even though Chloe doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to know, she can’t shake off the uneasy feeling she got from the hard look on Rachel’s face. “Hey,” she says, and Rachel looks at her again, expression unreadable. “Is it like this for you guys? For anyone else?”

For a second she thinks Rachel doesn’t understand the question. But then her eyes flick slow from Chloe’s eyes to the blood on her hands to the pained crease at the bridge of her nose, and she says, carefully, “No.”

Chloe closes her eyes, exhales through her mouth.

“We get visions during the day sometimes,” Rachel’s voice says, so even that it’s nearly flat. “And dreams. But it doesn’t- hurt us. None of us bleed.”

Without opening her eyes, Chloe gestures towards Rachel with one hand. “Pass me that.”

The blunt is fit between her index and middle fingers, and she lifts it to her mouth, takes a hit still with her eyes closed. After she exhales, she says, “Don’t tell anyone else.”

“I haven’t,” Rachel says. “I won’t.”

The rest of their time at the lighthouse is spent in silence. Chloe can’t tell if it’s a comfortable one or not. 

\---

A lot of their conversations become stop-and-start. It’s not the way it used to be.

“Have you seen Frank?” Chloe says. The water is far down the beach, splashing low and quiet against the sand. She’s not thinking about Max. She’s just watching the sunlight hit Rachel’s hair.

Rachel just shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Well, yes, but not to hang out. Just to pick up.” She shrugs, like it doesn’t really matter. “It’s just that there’s not a lot to talk about anymore. You know. We’re all changing.”

Chloe doesn’t want to be changing. She wiggles her toes, digs her feet deeper into the sand.

“How’s the diner?” Rachel says. “Joyce is all good?”

Chloe nods, crossing her arms over her chest. “Same as always.”

There’s a brief pause, then Rachel says casually, “Have you seen that girl again?”

After about a week or so, Chloe’s found she doesn’t really like Rachel asking about Max. She can’t really explain why, just that it creates a sour feeling in the pit of her stomach. She hugs her arms tighter to her chest. “No.”

The silence is longer this time. Rachel’s flannel flutters quietly in the sea breeze. Chloe’s jacket is still back in the truck, and it’s kind of chilly, but she’s not going to say so and she’s not going to go back for it.

“How are your girls?” she ends up saying, against her better judgment, because she hates standing in silence. “They all seem kind of uptight whenever I see them.”

Which isn’t too often, not anymore, but she still remembers the tight looks on Dana’s and Juliet’s face and Kate’s frown and all the whispers that permeate in and around the diner. She can’t exactly blame the goddess girls for being somber, even if their visions and shit aren’t as damaging as Chloe’s are, but the aura of dread they’re bringing into the mood of the town isn’t pleasant, unexplainable or not.

When she glances over, Rachel is looking at her carefully. She’s not allowed to bring up the goddess except on Chloe’s terms, and even then it’s tenuous, she’s never sure how far she’s allowed to go.

“They’re okay,” she says finally. “They’re nervous.”

Even though she really shouldn’t, Chloe asks, “Why?”

Rachel frowns, but she doesn’t look away, keeps watching Chloe’s face to make sure she doesn’t overstep. “We keep seeing new things,” she says. “It’s not like it was before. The visions are more ominous. More dreams about the storm. Kate and I are having a hard time trying to figure out what it all means, trying to keep track of what everyone sees. And since Victoria took all of her stuff from us, there’s a big gap now in what we have.”

Because Rachel’s back, Chloe had to hide Victoria’s journal, take it out of her truck and stuff it in the back of one of her drawers. She still hasn’t looked at it again. About once a day she considers shredding it. She hasn’t yet. “Uh huh.”

“And,” Rachel says, still watching her and waiting for the stop signal, “we’re getting less of the deer now, and more of, like. Kind of a person? Or just the vague idea of one. We don’t know if she’s attempting to manifest in our visions, or send us a signal, or something, but we’ve started putting a lot of effort into figuring out what she looks like as a human. A humanoid, anyway.”

So they’ve finally started the stage of worship where you try to turn a deity into a person. Chloe’s surprised it’s taken them this long. “So what does she look like?”

Maybe sensing that this is the last question, Rachel finally looks away, brushing some hair out of her face. “We don’t really know yet,” she says. “But she seems small. Young.”

“That’s nice,” Chloe says.

“Yeah,” Rachel says. “Can you drive me to the church?”

\---

Chloe’s still having dreams, but none of them are about Rachel anymore. Maybe, like most real things, even she can’t exist in two places at once.

She doesn’t dream about the storm as much as other people do, though, which she knows is weird even if she doesn’t want to think about what makes it weird. She remembers, vaguely, being told that what made Kate special, what made Rachel special, is that their dreams were different from the others, were ominous in their own _special_ way.

Chloe doesn’t dream about the storm, mostly. She dreams about sunlight.

It’s sunny, and she’s holding a gun. It’s sunny, and in front of her is the corpse of Frank’s dog, blue butterfly resting peacefully on a messy wound in its side. It’s sunny, and there’s the shrieking sound of a train, and as much as she tries she can’t move her legs.

It’s sunny, and she’s looking up at the ceiling of her bedroom, and someone is just a few feet away from her, moving about her room with light footsteps. She wants to look down and beyond her own body to see who it is, to know who it is making her chest feel tight, but she can’t look beyond that one water stain in the ceiling.

Whoever it is at the foot of her bed says, “We’re not kids anymore,” and Chloe _knows_ that voice. The recognition startles her awake.

She’s not bleeding, but her chest still has that clenched feeling, like her heart is getting too big for her ribs. 

For the first time she considers opening Victoria’s goddess journal, thinks about her drawing of the pale legs and splayed hands, then immediately stands up and takes a cold shower. It’s two in the morning, and she can hear David rustling around downstairs. 

\---

Three days later, and the diner’s fuller than it’s ever been. There’s nowhere to sit down, and Chloe has to be all elbows just to walk from booth to booth. People are all chattering, near excitement, and it’s so jarringly different from the slow, creeping sense of uneasiness that’s been haunting the entire establishment for so long that it makes Chloe even more anxious than she was before. 

“Chloe!” Joyce calls from a few booths over. She has at least three trays balanced on her arms, and even more strands of hair falling loose from her bun. “What the hell is going on here? Did Rachel mention anything about- all this?”

No, because Chloe wouldn’t have known to ask. “No!” Chloe calls back, swiping her hair behind her ear and pouring another glass of orange juice before snapping, “Listen, Tommy, I don’t care if you’ve sat in that stool every day for a hundred years, it’s _full_ -”

Nearly three-fourths of the diner’s occupants are tourists, which is unprecedented and slightly inconvenient because Chloe can’t yell at any of them by name. Even as she hurries back and forth to follow Joyce’s shouts and fill mugs, she can’t help but pause, every so often, do a quick cursory search amongst all the booths and the people standing around. 

She wonders if Max has made it home yet.

There’s a loud jangle of bells above the door, and just that isn’t enough to make Chloe look, but the way the diner immediately falls into a hush does it. She glances up from the leftmost booth in the diner to see Rachel striding in, Kate Marsh a few tentative steps behind her, smiling beatifically as though she expected nothing less than to have all eyes on her.

“Hey, everyone!” she says cheerfully, to the room at large, and Chloe’s never really seen her Priestess of the Goddess act in its full glory before. Hastily, she straightens the orange juice carton again before the customer’s glass overflows. “Thank you all so much for coming out and supporting the church. For those of you who don’t know, I’m Rachel Amber, and this is Kate Marsh. I’m here to let you know that the church _will_ open today for visitors and spectators, no charge, but not until four o’clock. Kate will be here to answer any questions you may have to the best of her ability, but I need to return to the church to oversee some of the last steps in installment. I will be there when visiting hours open, however, so please come. Until then, please be patient and-” Slyly, she winks at Chloe over the counter. “Tip your waitresses.”

A sudden din of applause starts up, and as soon as Joyce looks away to serve at the booth again, appearing affectionately bemused, Chloe flips Rachel off. All she gets for her trouble is a split second of seeing Rachel’s smirk, though, before she’s swallowed up by a large crowd of tourists and townspeople alike, her and Kate both vanishing like commodities into the swell.

Chloe’s not sure if she’s supposed to be waiting for something, but it’s going to take Rachel a minute to fight her way out of that thrall, if she manages to do it at all, so Chloe just goes back to pouring drink. 

After a minute, though, there’s a clink in the jukebox, and a rock song starts playing. Even though she doesn’t look over because she’s halfway through distributing bacon across plates down the counter, she knows it must be Rachel that put it on- it’s Chloe’s favorite song in that old thing, one she hasn’t put on in a while because Joyce won’t let her take quarters out of the cash register anymore.

She’s almost halfway through a smile when a sharp pain comes shooting through her head again. Two hard beats of a pulse, an echo of something that sounds almost like a laugh, then the ache, which is what lasts the longest.

But she’s getting used to this. She just grits her teeth, and her hand doesn’t shake, she just keeps passing on the bacon. It’s only when the patron in front of her gasps and whispers, “Honey, your-” that she remembers her nose must be bleeding. 

After she puts the griddle back onto the stove and turns back around, one hand to her nose, Rachel’s right in front of her, on the other side of the counter, bright-eyed and expectant. She’s smiling, too, until she sees Chloe hurriedly rubbing the blood off her face, and it fades away. “God, Chloe-”

“It’s fine, I’m fine,” Chloe says, brusquely, brushes her hands off each other and leaning with palms flat against the counter to meet Rachel’s eyes. “What the fuck is going on, Rachel? This is a fuckton of people, you know.”

For a moment, Rachel just nods, eagerly, but then her grin fades a little, and she reaches across the counter to wipe away some blood Chloe must have missed. Chloe does her best not to stiffen at the touch. “It isn’t a bad thing, Chloe, I promise. Something big happened, it’s almost kind of like… a celebration, I guess? We got a huge gift.”

As much as Chloe appreciates the hard attempt at abstraction Rachel’s been keeping up, at times it can get pretty fucking annoying. “Like what?”

Rachel opens her mouth twice, looking excited and thoughtful, before closing it again both times. Then, a little uncertainly, she says, “I could show you. It’s at the church, but- it would only be me and you there. And it’s really worth seeing.”

Chloe knows going to the church is a bad idea. She knows that.

Still, the way Rachel says _only me and you_ has always gotten to her.

“Yeah, okay,” she says. “Okay, but only for a little bit. Diner’s too crowded to ditch Joyce for the whole day. Let me just show her I’m bleeding and then we can go.” 

That makes Rachel smile again, but there’s still something too tentative in her eyes, too concerned, when Chloe lifts up the divider and ambles towards Joyce. She stays a step behind Chloe as they head over, which is very much unlike her, waving off tourists and admirers distractedly.

It’s easier to convince Joyce than she thought it would be. All it takes is her saying, “Mom, hey-” and Joyce looks up, gasps, and then frowns.

One hand on her hip, she turns away from the booth, eyes going wide and concerned as they rove over Chloe’s face. “Chloe, oh my goodness. Again?”

There’s a very, very slight pause in Rachel’s breathing behind her, but Chloe doesn’t notice things like that, she can’t. “Yeah, uh,” she says, touching self-consciously at her nose, “um, I think- I think I need a few minutes-”

“Go,” Joyce says emphatically, already reaching for her apron expectantly, “go wash off, get some fresh air- Rachel, make sure she gets some fresh air, won’t you?”

Chloe has to assumes Rachel nods as she’s pulling her apron over her head, because Rachel’s tugging her elbow as soon as it’s off. “I’ll bring her back to you real soon, Joyce,” she says sweetly, the both of them already backing towards the door. 

Joyce just calls, “Rachel, don’t let that girl drive!” before the diner door swings shut behind them.

As soon as they’re outside, Rachel lets go of her elbow, comes in front of Chloe to look her in the eyes. She’s almost glaring, nearly, but she doesn’t look angry. “Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about it. I know. But please just tell me, like- how often is this happening to you?”

She gestures shortly to the blood stuck staining on Chloe’s hands, the remnants of it she’s still trying to rub away from her nose and lips, and Chloe doesn’t look at her, just rubs harder at it. “I’m fine, Rachel.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“A lot!” Chloe snaps, and blood drips into her mouth and tastes like metal and salt. “Every day! Are you going to write that down in your dream journal? Or are you just going to sit on it and keep looking at me like I’m a fucking obstacle on your personal path to enlightenment?”

Rachel blinks, a couple of times. But she holds her ground. “I’m worried about you,” she says, her voice just controlled enough to not be edgy. The threat of it is still there, though. “This isn’t about me. I’m always worried about you.” Before Chloe can respond, she just shakes her head and holds out one hand. “Give me your keys.” 

\---

The car ride there is long, and silent, and tense, and it doesn’t do anything to help Chloe’s headache. 

She hates not driving her own car. 

They’re already parked a few yards from the warehouse, and there’s this grinding sound of metal and crashing that is unfamiliar at least to Chloe, and she’s not sure if Rachel’s waiting for her to climb out of the car when Rachel says, “We could help you, you know.”

When she glances over, Rachel’s not looking at her, just gazing fixedly out the opposite window. The heel of her hand is holding her temple up, and Chloe waits for more but there isn’t any.

“No, you can’t,” she says, not to be contrary but just because she really believes it. Her voice so heavy in her own mouth that she hopes it doesn’t press down too hard on Rachel. “You guys barely know what you’re doing already. There’s nothing you can do to fix this.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You could at least let us try.”

This time when she glances at Rachel, Rachel’s still not looking at her, but her brow is creased. Chloe kind of wants to touch her, but she’s not sure how, so she doesn’t. “Rachel, listen,” she says, because she doesn’t want to fight about this, fighting about this is exactly why she spent those last two weeks alone. “I’m not like you, okay? I don’t want to- to poke and prod at this and make it worse in order to understand it. I’m just- if I leave it alone, then at least I know it won’t get worse than it already is. It hurts to talk about it. It hurts to think about it. That’s why I don’t. I know it’s not the same for you, but-”

She lets herself trail off, closes her eyes. There’s only a moment of listening to grinding gears before Rachel says, “It’s human nature to be afraid of what you don’t understand, Chloe.”

Her eyes open again, and this time Rachel is looking at her. That’s what makes it easier to say, “Yeah, but it’s not _your_ nature. Ever since this whole thing started- you started it, you were the one who wanted to know and understand and explore even though it got scary. You don’t get it, you don’t get the same feeling from this that I-”

“I know,” Rachel says, and her eyes are fixed on Chloe now, unyielding. “I know you and I aren’t seeing the same things and we’re not feeling the same things. But you’re wrong if you think I’m not scared too.” She exhales, quietly, and looks at the dashboard. “I’m really scared.”

Chloe has never, ever heard Rachel say that before. 

So she stays silent, and Rachel continues, “That’s why I’m doing all this, I want to understand what it means. That’s the only way- the only way to not be scared is to understand all this. Otherwise it’s just going to haunt us. And that’s the best case scenario.” Her hands curl, just slightly, in her lap. “And I want to know why it’s hurting you. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Even after thirty seconds, Chloe still can’t think of something fitting to say, so in the end she just says, “So what did you want to show me?”

That makes Rachel look up again, and she even smiles a little, which is a relief. “Oh, right,” she says, and reaches into one of her pockets to withdraw an unsmoked, neatly wrapped blunt. Chloe starts laughing, she can’t help herself, and Rachel gives a short giggle. “Oh, no, it’s not this! This is unrelated, and also mine. The actual thing is inside the church. I think you might actually like it, Chloe. It’s gorgeous.”

Rachel’s smiling again, so even though there’s definitely still things Chloe should be saying, should be telling her, she just says, “Okay, then show me,” and gets out of the car.

\---

It’s pretty clear what _it_ is as soon as you walk through the door, because the warehouse is huge and holey and anything that immediately shatters the place with color and light it going to be immediately apparent. Chloe nearly stops in her tracks once they get through the door, but Rachel prods her in the back so they at least get all the way in.

The three gaps in the warehouse where light had filtered in makeshift windows have at least been filled in with glass, but it’s the one at the head of the warehouse that’s clearly the centerpiece, and clearly what Rachel had been talking about- that installation is stained.

It’s definitely an art piece, and incontestably beautiful, and it pulls this shitpit together like it’s a real church, shining stark colors onto all the white tableclothed altars around the room. The glass is a rainbow of brightness, set against the early morning light, and as much as Chloe hopes, when she looks at it, to see abstraction, the symbolism of the piece is pretty plain.

The whole thing is garlanded with flowers, but all the other sections are easy to make out, and familiar- the blue butterfly hangs suspended in the lower right corner, a flock of birds frozen midflight in the left. The deer stands solitary at the top of the glass, but it’s less of a centerpiece and more of a halo to the real focal point- the image of a feminine body, huge and sprawling, decorated in turn by each of the symbols around her.

She’s vague, hairless and expressionless, hardly defined as a person. But she does look small, young, like Rachel had said. Her right hand is lifted aloft, the other clenched into a fist at her side, and Chloe can’t tell if she’s supposed to look kind or vengeful.

At the center of her pale body, there’s a huge splash of red, a sharply angular heart, with a very evident crack running down its scarlet center.

“Commission,” Rachel says from behind her, breathing out a mouthful of smoke. Chloe hadn’t heard her light the blunt. “Isn’t it just stunning? We put the order in, but it was a donation. Couple of patrons from Seattle, they’re driving down and I’m having lunch with them tomorrow. It was pretty expensive, but people were willing to pay. Considering, you know, we’re a cult where all our priestesses are cute girls.”

That’s true, but it doesn’t seem like that can be the only reason for paying for a small town girls’ cult’s fucking stained glass window. “Yeah, that,” Chloe says, staring up at it, squinting as light hits the heart and showers them both with bloody sunlight, “and there’s a huge fucking crack down the middle.”

Rachel nods, lowers her joint and rolls it contemplatively between two fingers. “That’s there on purpose,” she says. “It’s one of the symbols of the goddess.”

“Cracked glass?”

“Smartass,” Rachel says, but she’s grinning when she lifts the joint back up to her mouth again. “No. A broken heart.”

That sobers Chloe up. She looks back up to the window again, at the sharp, jagged division between two sides of the red glass, at the way the form’s pale hand stretches beyond it. There’s something so painful there, suddenly, that she just can’t put her finger on.

Glancing at her, Rachel continues, “Any of the others ever tell you about the mortal beloved theory?”

Typically Chloe’s not one for archaic jargon, but that phrase always hits her right in the chest. Reaching for the joint, she says, “They’ve just mentioned it. Said you came up with it.”

Passing the weed to her, Rachel speaks, still looking up thoughtfully at the glass window, “I mean, I did, but it wasn’t just me who sensed it. There’s like… sometimes when we have visions where she’s there, or, like, sort of there, there’s this underlying current of this feeling that’s a lot like- longing, I guess. I don’t know how else to describe it.” Her eyes are careful on Chloe, watching her lift the blunt to her mouth. “Have you ever felt anything like that?”

Chloe is familiar with longing. She hits the blunt, breathes out, and says, “Can’t say I have.”

“Yeah, it’s not as common a feeling,” Rachel says, undaunted, and gesturing for the joint again. “People like Kate and Dana and I get it the most. But we think- a lot of this is assumption, but you know, we have to rely on what we feel for most of this anyway. We think the goddess had a human lover, at some point, somehow. Or at least someone she loved, we can’t know if it was reciprocated. But because there’s that sense of longing, of separation, we think that it’s a human she was in love with, and that they, like- can’t be together, because of that. Or some other reason.”

The figure in the glass has thin hands. Chloe says, “That’s a lot to assume.”

“It is,” Rachel says easily. “But everything is a lot to assume. And we haven’t been proven wrong yet. It would also explain why she’s been showing up in a more humanoid form lately, and that feeling of sadness, like there’s a wall- the reason she seems to be closer to some people than others. Maybe she’s still trying to reach out to that person, the mortal beloved, whoever it is. Even though they can’t be together.”

“That’s so fucking sad,” Chloe says, despite herself. She can’t tear her eyes away from the crack in the glass.

Rachel shrugs, and blows some smoke in her face. “That’s life,” she says. Then, “Come to visiting hours today.”

The butterfly, electric blue in the corner of the glass, is what sets Chloe straight, startled and suddenly anxious. “No,” she says, more firmly that she means to. “I should be heading back to the diner. Let me drive this time.”

\---

The ride back to the diner is quiet too, but this one is at least more comfortable. 

_Mortal beloved_ keeps echoing like a stuck song lyric in her head, and it doesn’t hurt like other things do but she can’t get it out, all the same. 

She parks back in her spot, and waits for Rachel to get out before following her. “So what’s next, then? For you.”

Rachel bites her lip, resting one hand against the back pocket of her pants, and Chloe tries not to mirror the movement, folds her hands over her chest instead. “Well, today’s going to be a big tour day, obviously,” she says. “When everyone’s gone, the girls and I are going to try to focus on the mortal beloved thing, see if we can get any more clues on who it might be. If the goddess trying to reach out for them so badly it must be important. Tomorrow I’ll be here to have brunch with the Seattle couple, and then- I actually kind of wanted to ask you a favor.” 

Even after the shit they’ve been through, seeing Rachel look this hesitant is unusual. It makes all of Chloe’s nerve endings light up. “Yeah? What?”

Rachel hedges for another second, then says, “David was involved with the Jefferson bust. Do you know if he has any, shit, I don’t know, evidence from it in your house? Pictures or drawings or shit like that?”

Three days into not talking to Rachel and stewing, Chloe had actually gone through David’s shit with that exact objective in mind, the words _Rachel Amber was his next target_ burned in her head. She’d found a box. She hadn’t opened it. “Why?”

“I’ve been having weird visions,” Rachel says, very quickly. “I think they’re connected. I want to look into it, but I need your help. Does he or doesn’t he?”

She’s talking like she’s trying to rip off a bandaid, and it gets Chloe to say, “yeah,” before she thinks better of it.

That makes Rachel nod, tight and almost surgical, and she continues, “Okay. I thought so. Paranoid ass. Let me come over to your place, I want to look at them.” Before Chloe can even inhale the breath it’ll take to say no, she looks her square in the eyes and says, “Please, Chloe.”

Chloe’s weak, always, for Rachel and for the word please, and she’s not an asshole either. She remembers Rachel saying, not even an hour ago, that she was scared.

Chloe’s scared too.

“Okay,” she says, and when Rachel’s eyes go wide, “okay, but listen. This is a fucking in-and-out job, and I don’t want to look at these fucking pictures with you either. Once they’re yours, they’re yours. I’m not touching them.”

Joyce knocks on the window, and they both jump. Chloe nods quickly in the direction of her expectant stare, and she’s planning on saying more to Rachel when she looks back at her but when she tilts her head back down Rachel is right there, pressing a small, dry kiss to her cheek.

“Thank you, Chloe,” she breathes. “I’ll talk to you later.”

Then she’s disappearing down the street, at a pretty quick clip. Chloe looks after her for too long, and even when she’s climbing up the diner steps she hesitates, calls after her. “Rachel?”

Rachel looks back at her, hands tucked into her pockets, smiling, cheeks a little pink against the breeze. “Yeah?”

_Rachel Amber was his next target_.

“See you later,” Chloe calls vaguely, and heads inside. 

Joyce frowns concernedly at her when she strings the apron back on over her head, but she’s not bleeding anymore, so there’s really nothing to say.


	6. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year, everyone! Thanks, thanks, thanks to Haaku and Kaelin for beta'ing!

Chloe dreams about death again that night, but this one is a death she knows.

She used to dream about her dad’s funeral a lot, for nearly two years after the real one, always as nightmares even though they were pretty much play-by-plays of what had actually happened. They’d come less and less after Joyce had married David, because she’d stopped feeling comfortable screaming at night, and after that she’d stopped dreaming of anything at all, really, until this whole goddess bullshit started up.

So it’s nauseating, immediately, when this particular dream decides to come back, awful and altered and warped with time and the new fear that’s grown into Chloe to accompany the grief that was already there. 

It starts the same as it used to, as the real funeral had been- a black, tangled mass of people, who all wanted to touch her and not be touched, and it’s sunny. Birds are chirping and everything is too loud and Chloe is fourteen and her body is too small to hold this pit inside itself without crumbling apart. 

Joyce is holding her hand tight. What the people say to them comes in hissing echoes, faded and menacing. 

_We’re so sorry for this loss_

_Taken before his time_

_God has a plan for us all_

_The Goddess has a plan for you, Chloe_

Chloe spins around, flying out of Joyce’s grip, but suddenly Joyce is gone anyway, all of the murmuring mourning throng is gone. It’s just Chloe, and the casket, and the girl sitting on top of it. 

She’s small, maybe twelve or thirteen, and her legs are crossed neatly over the seam of William’s coffin. Her dark brown hair is gathered behind her in a ponytail, and she’s wearing all black, gathered up in a dress that’s a little too wide over her thin shoulders. In her hands she holds the blue butterfly, watching it carefully as it pulses and flutters between her fingers.

Chloe knows her. 

This is new. This is new and it is so real that it’s like a part of the memory itself. Her whole body is pulsing along with the the restless flap of the butterfly as she tries to meet the girl’s eyes, as she comes closer to her with legs that are too fawnish still to stand on their own.

_Talk to me_ , her mind is screaming, desperate, in the girl’s direction, _talk to me, talk to me, just talk to me, please, talk to me, look at me_. 

The girl doesn’t look at her. She’s still just looking at her hands, the butterfly in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she says. 

“Don’t be sorry,” Chloe’s mouth says. She wants to reach out. She wants the girl to reach out, hold her hand, hold her, something, something that’s not this empty space between them. 

But the girl doesn’t reach out. She doesn’t look at her, still, just keeps gazing down at the butterfly cupped in her hands. Her crossed ankles are tapping in restless one-two rhythm against the wood and steel holding Chloe’s father captive. “I’m leaving,” she says. 

And Chloe’s seen nothing but storms and blood and death in almost every dream she’s ever had, every nightmare since her dad died, but hearing this girl say those words is worse than any of them. It feels as though her chest has caved in.

“You can’t leave,” she says.

“Soon,” the girl says.

She still isn’t looking at Chloe, and Chloe knows that she has to say something to her, the something that’s big and real and trapped beating hard between her ribs because maybe if she says that, the girl will stay, but first the girl has to just fucking look at her. 

“You can’t leave!” she says, and she’s reaching for the girl with her right hand, and bright color and green vines spirals suddenly up her forearm in a burst of movement and light. It startles her, but not out of movement, and she touches the girl’s hand, just barely. 

Her fingers fall open, out of their cusp, and the butterfly floats away.

The girl’s head snaps up, and suddenly she isn’t small and ponytailed and black-clad anymore, suddenly she’s Max, just as Max is in the other dreams. Max soaked through with clothes stuck to her, dark and drowned and tears in her eyes. 

Chloe’s hand is loose around hers. Max is still sitting on William’s coffin. The sky is black, and cracking open.

“It’s okay,” Max says, “you’re not going to remember,” and her voice is so loud and somehow so small, and Chloe wakes up.

She wakes up crying, hysterically, and it’s three in the morning and it’s too warm in her room and everything in her whole body aches like it’s old and she wants someone to be here and hold her but she doesn’t know who she wants. 

It doesn’t matter, though, because there’s no one, not here and probably not anywhere else.

\---

She drives Joyce to work that day, and Joyce chatters easily about some drama spun by one of their regulars, one that Chloe doesn’t have to be too involved with to hum along to. Her grip is tight around the steering wheel. She takes a couple of turns too hard.

Rachel had told her once that it’s impossible to dream up faces, that everyone Chloe sees in her dreams is someone she must have known at some point or another, however fleetingly, however unimportant.

So she must have known that little girl, the one who was sad and small and dark in such a familiar and aching way that her mind automatically linked her to Max. Chloe’s been thinking about it all morning but her mind just can’t place her. It’s frustrating to know that remembrance lingers so close at the border between subconsciousness and consciousness, that she’s so close to the secret of why her mind assigned that little girl, who certainly hadn’t been at her dad’s funeral, to be right on top of his grave. 

It’s only when they pull into the Two Whales lot that Joyce says, a little too casually, “Also, I think it might be a good idea to check in with your doctor later this week.”

That brings them into park way harder than Chloe meant, and they both lurch forward, Chloe hissing “ _shit_!” under her breath as they both hit back against the seats. Joyce just tuts, sounding more annoyed than hurt. “Jesus, Chloe.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Chloe says, closing her eyes and leaning further back against the leather. “But shit, Mom, don’t spring that on me while I’m driving, Jesus Christ! Why am I supposed to go to the doctor?”

Joyce just blinks at her, a little owlish. “Well, I thought you might want to,” she says. “Considering your nosebleed problem. It just doesn’t seem to be getting any better, and I think enough time has passed that-”

“No,” Chloe says, and pulls the keys out of ignition.

That gets her a huff at first, and a “Chloe,” but Chloe knew this conversation was coming twenty-four hours ago, from the way Joyce said _again_ at the sight of blood. She’s ready for it. “No, no thanks, he’ll just make me take my clothes off and stick shit up my nose and give me some grape-flavored bullshit that won’t help and then we’ll be two grand deeper in debt. I’m fine. It’ll pass.”

And she gets out of the car, because she knows if she does then the conversation will be over; if she stays Joyce will huff and fuss, but in the end she’ll let Chloe have her way, because Chloe’s right and they don’t have the money to roll out on what could be just a chapped nose. But if Chloe gets out of the car, they don’t have to acknowledge that they’re poor and alone in the world and can’t take care of themselves the way that people should. 

So they go inside, and they put on their aprons in silence, and Chloe wonders if Joyce ever wanted to run away like Chloe wants to run away. She wonders if Joyce is stronger or weaker for not taking a car and just going until nothing could follow, out of this shit town and the way it never lets go of awful memories and never changes for the better.

Or maybe she’s just waiting, like Chloe is waiting, for the right moment to leave.

Then the bell jangles, and she has to put the thought out of her head. Chloe’s too young to be becoming her mother.

\---

She’d actually forgotten Rachel was coming until Rachel shows up, and even then it takes her a second to remember why she’s there with two middle-aged people. 

The diner is still so swamped with tourists all starry-eyed over the stained glass that Chloe doesn’t know she’s even there until Joyce waves her over to the counter, shoves a coffeepot back into her hand and leans across the tabletop to whisper. “Do I spy Rachel Amber with parents in our establishment?”

“There’s no chance they’re hers,” Chloe says, without even looking.

When she does turn, though, she can see why Joyce might have thought so. The man and woman sitting across from a vibrantly beaming Rachel in the midleft booth do have a sort of benevolent, parentish air to them, the woman cardiganed and the man bearded and both smiling at Rachel like they’ve never been more charmed. They probably haven’t been. “Oh, um. Shit. They’re, uh, the patrons. Of the art piece the church girls had the big announcement for yesterday.”

“Oh my goodness,” Joyce says, fluttering, and she turns back to the grill but still peeks curiously at where Rachel is talking animatedly with the couple. “Well, go on then, Chloe, give them some good service.”

She doesn’t need to tell Chloe twice. People who drop a couple grand for shiny glass they’ll never see again probably leave really good tips.

When she approaches the table, coffee pot in hand, Rachel beams up at her, stopping mid-sentence to say, “Hi!” Then, to the couple on the other side of the booth, “This is the girl I was telling you about, Chloe. She’s my best friend, she helps out around the church. Chloe, this is Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield, the people who donated the stained glass.”

Chloe forces a smile in their general direction without really meeting their eyes, bending to fill their mugs. “Nice to meet you. It was great of you guys to do that, the priestesses are crazy about that window.”

Rachel laughs breathily, and kicks her in the shin under the table. But the woman just laughs. “It was our pleasure,” she says. “I think it’s a really amazing thing, what you girls are doing here.”

Being grouped in with _you girls_ sets Chloe’s nerves on edge instantly, but she can’t deny it now, not with Rachel smiling pretty right there and not when these Caulfield people have probably dropped a couple grand on some painted glass. Instead, she just straightens up, meets their eyes, and smiles, trying for more sincerity this time. “I think so too.”

They both smile back, and when Chloe looks at their faces, her own grin slips away. There’s another pang in her head, not like pain but like familiarity, a muted version of what she feels when Max is around. Her grip on the coffeepot tightens.

When she glances back at the woman, her smile has faded too. She’s frowning at Chloe now, looking slightly dazed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know you just said your name, but. Have we met before?”

Startled, Chloe glances at Rachel, who just blinks and shakes her head once, wide-eyed. “Um. I don’t think so? Rachel told me you’re from Seattle, so-”

“Vanessa and I are originally from Arcadia Bay,” the husband says. His voice is still pleasant, but he’s squinting at Chloe now too, as if trying to place her. She shifts from one foot to the other, and wishes for the first time in her life that Joyce will start yelling for her to get back to work. “We moved five years ago. Maybe we could have crossed paths before then.”

She laughs nervously, places the coffee pot down on the table and starts reaching for her pad. “I mean, I was just a kid back then. So unless I might’ve run with one of yours-”

The so-claimed Vanessa just shakes her head sadly. “Ryan and I never had any children, unfortunately,” she says, looking down at the table in a way that makes Chloe want badly to not be here, not be witnessing this private sadness. Then she shakes her head and looks up, smiling again like she’s forcing herself to do it. “I’m sorry, that’s such a strange question to ask. You just seemed so familiar to me.”

“Yeah,” Chloe says, blinking at her and not wanting to say yeah, same, because that’ll only make things weirder, worse. In a brief, desperate attempt to escape, even just slightly, Chloe tears her gaze away from the table, eyes fixing on the window instead.

Max is there.

Max is a few feet ahead of the bus stop, looking into the diner, staring at the booth Chloe’s standing by. Her hands are curled into fists by her sides, but the look in her eyes is so huge and vulnerable that it takes Chloe’s breath away. Her gaze flickers slightly when Chloe looks her way, and it moves from the couple in the booth to see Chloe staring back at her. Her eyes go even wider, and a little fearful.

Without having time to think of social graces, Chloe grabs Rachel’s shoulder with her free hand. “Rachel!” she says, shaking her a little so she’ll turn and see, “There, there’s the girl I’ve been telling you about, Max-”

Vanessa Caulfield says, “Max?” in a strange voice, but Chloe ignores her, so focused on getting Rachel to look that she nearly turns her around herself. Rachel, for her part, props herself up in the seat to look out the window, eyes focused and searching.

“I don’t see anyone,” she says. 

Chloe’s head whips around, and sure enough Max is gone, as though she’s never been there, same as always. She gives a cursory look outside, through all the windows, but the girl’s disappeared without a trace. 

“Damn,” she mutters, and picks her writing pad back up. “Fucking again, how does she- never mind.” Refocusing on the Caulfields, she says, “Sorry, that was weird. Personal problem. Anyway, sorry this is probably the shittiest service you’ve ever had. What would you like to eat?”

All three inhabitants of the table are now giving her the strangest looks she’s ever received in-diner. Ryan Caulfield is the first to break the silence, by coughing and saying, “Uh, how are the waffles?”

“Great,” Chloe says promptly, jotting it down and looking expectantly at Vanessa Caulfield. 

Not so much in Chloe’s direction, but Vanessa is staring at a crack in the table with the deepest thought and confusion Chloe’s ever seen. It’s only when her husband prods her that she says, “Oh, um. The vegetarian omelette, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Nodding, Chloe says, “Sure. And regular for you, Rachel?”

“Yeah,” Rachel says absently, but grabs her arm as she starts walking away and hisses, “We’re talking later. Check your phone and _don’t_ ignore me, this is important.”

She doesn’t need Rachel to tell her that. Actually, she doesn’t need Rachel to tell her anything. Still, though, she’s been unprofessional enough already, so she just says, “yeah, okay,” and heads up to the counter.

Due mostly to her eagerness in running away, she misses Vanessa Caulfield whispering, “Max,” under her breath, misses the troubled look on her face.

Even Joyce is looking at the couple in the booth, looking unsettled. Chloe tries not to let it get to her, just hands her the order sheet and takes the two plates in her hands from her. “Chloe, honey, did you figure out who those people with Rachel are?”

“Out of townies,” Chloe says shortly, and leaves it at that.

\---

Rachel doesn’t make her strike up a conversation with the Caulfields again, just smiles at her when she brings over their food and then the bill and says, “see you later, check your texts,” as she’s leaving with them in tow. Chloe just gives her a salute and goes back to wiping down the counter.

Max.

Why can’t Rachel ever see her?

Why hasn’t she gone home yet?

“Mom,” she says, when Joyce comes around the counter to fry some bacon, the lunch hour refusing to reprieve them of boiling grease. “Remember, like, a month ago, when that girl showed up here? And ordered pancakes and then disappeared?”

Joyce frowns, thoughtful, down at the stovetop. “I think… so,” she says slowly. “Small girl, right? Cute. Good posture.”

“Yeah,” Chloe says eagerly, “yeah, you saw her too. Have you seen her since then?”

After giving it a good minute of thought, Joyce shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says, shaking the pan a little and hissing along with the grease. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve just… seen her around,” Chloe says, and she’s going to say more but then her phone beeps. She knows it has to be Rachel, but checking the screen is more automatic than voluntary.

**Rachel** : pick me up @ church @ 2 pretty please

Chloe shoves her phone back in her pocket, and starts wiping in wider circles. “If I work through my break, can I get off at two? Rachel wants a ride.”

She ignores all of Joyce’s hemming and hawing, knowing the end product will be yes, but tunes back in when Joyce goes on, “So has Rachel finally dragged you into the spooky occult business then?”

Not technically. Not Rachel. “No. She gave up on me. I’m just her chauffeur.”

“Chloe, if you scrub that counter any harder it’ll crack in two,” Joyce says reprovingly, then lays her bacon to rest on a paper towel beside the stove. “Well, just be careful. I know Rachel and all them are sweet girls, but that whole deal with the church and the goddess gives me the heebie jeebies.”

Maybe it’s a genetic thing, then. Chloe has to put down the rag before she scrubs her own skin off. “I’m trying to stay out of it, Mom.”

“Doesn’t sound like you, staying out of trouble,” Joyce says, amused, “but good girl.”

She waves through the window when Chloe drives off, and it comes out of nowhere but suddenly Chloe feels as though she’s never loved her more. 

It’s not a happy feeling. It sits heavy in her stomach, like stones, like something precious and ugly.

\---

Rachel is standing outside the church with the Caulfields when Chloe pulls up, hands clasped behind her back and still chattering eagerly with both of them. Chloe leans back in her seat to wait, rolls down the window to listen.

This turns out to be a bad idea.

“... girls doing now?” Ryan Caulfield’s voice says pleasantly, and Chloe closes her eyes. “You’re continuing to pursue threads, right? What are you looking into currently?”

Then Rachel’s voice, sweet and formal. “Well, our focus right now is trying to conceptualize the goddess’s human form- many priestesses keep getting flashes of her physical presence, so we’re trying to work together to create a fuller picture between us of what she looks like. Hopefully we’ll have significant progress on that project within the week, we’ve- oh, did Dana already tell you?”

There must be some nonverbal communication between the three of them that Chloe misses, but when she opens her eyes again she’s missed whatever nods and winks might’ve been exchanged. Instead, she just sees Vanessa Caulfield saying, “But what about the mortal beloved theory? Are you going to bench that for now?”

“I wouldn’t say we’re benching it,” Rachel says politely, her smile never faltering, “it’s just a much more difficult trail to follow, since we don’t have anything close to an indicator about-”

“Well, I would think it would have to be one of you girls,” Ryan Caulfield says, with a confidence that makes Chloe sit up straight again. “Just wouldn’t make sense otherwise.”

Rachel doesn’t flinch, or disagree, and if she can feel Chloe’s gaze boring into her from a hundred feet away she doesn’t do anything to show it. “Well, that’s what we think,” she says, her tone light. “It does seem more likely than not. Since some of our priestesses are significantly closer to her than others, we do think that maybe- we are considering, um, Kate Marsh, you met her-”

The sound of Vanessa Caulfield’s laughter is giggling and light and familiar, and it makes Chloe shift in her seat, uncomfortable. “You don’t have to be modest, Miss Amber,” she says, sounding amused. “Every girl I spoke to in there was clamoring to tell me they’re near positive you’re the mortal beloved.”

Chloe doesn’t even register that the sharp, sudden sound of a horn is coming from her car until Rachel’s head whips around, and she realizes her own hand is pressing hard down on the wheel of her truck. She pulls it away fast, but can’t catch her breath again, can’t stop the words _mortal beloved_ from echoing around too loud in her head again.

“I’m sorry, that’s my ride,” Rachel says hurriedly, and Chloe wants to stop staring at her like she’s watched someone been killed, but the words _mortal beloved, mortal beloved, they all think Rachel’s the mortal beloved_ are pounding too loud in her head to direct any thought to movement or social grace. “Again, thank you so, so much, Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield. You don’t know what these means for the church. I’ll be in touch very soon, and I hope you continue to support us.”

Whatever the Caulfields say back, Chloe tunes it out, just watches the easy sway of Rachel’s body as she waves goodbye, comes towards the car and climbs into the passenger seat. Before Chloe can open her mouth to say anything, without much of a plan but a lot of distress, Rachel just frowns at her with a “that was rude,” and then puts her feet up on the dash. “So, back to your place then?”

Chloe just gapes at her, misdirected and still aghast, and Rachel just blinks at her expectantly. “Um, Chloe? David’s box of Jefferson shit? Like we talked about yesterday?”

Vaguely Chloe does remember that, saying she’d take Rachel to the garage, but the memory of the words are just white noise against _mortal beloved, mortal beloved, they all think Rachel’s the mortal beloved_. Automatically, she shifts the car into drive, turns to head in the direction of her house, her movements mechanical and a little shaky.

They’re only out of the lot when Rachel says, “Chlo? You okay?” and that snaps her back in.

“What-” she starts, then has to wet her lips, swallow, take a deep breath. “What did she mean, they all think you’re the mortal beloved?” 

There’s the soft _shhh_ sound of Rachel’s hair whipping across the seat when she turns to look at Chloe, and in her peripheral vision she can see Rachel open her mouth, then hold it open, eyebrows working through confusion, worry, then wariness.

So it’s not a misunderstanding.

So Chloe kind of wants to die. 

“It’s not anything definite,” is what Rachel ends up saying, and in Chloe’s opinion that might be even worse than a yes. It’s an excuse. It’s Rachel tiptoeing around her again. “It’s just what they think, because I have the closest connection, and you know, I’m the leader, so they all want to assume-”

Blame shifting. Chloe nearly misses their turn, has to make sure the truck’s going in a straight line again before cutting Rachel off. “Who cares about what they think, what do _you_ want to assume? Do you think you’re- you’re fucking it? You think she’s in love with you?”

Rachel bites her lip, which is what she always does when she’s about to tell Chloe doesn’t want to hear. “Well. I mean. It’s not like-”

Chloe cuts her off again. She doesn’t actually want to hear an answer that’s not an immediate no. “And- and what,” she says, and she has to wet her lips again, they keep going dry, “so if you’re it, this mortal beloved thing. What does that mean? I mean, even if she’s into you or whatever, you don’t love her.”

There’s too long of a pause. Rachel leans against the window, and Chloe can’t see her face. 

“What- she’s not _real_ , Rachel!”

Now Rachel’s head turns, and she’s glaring which sucks, but at least it’s something, at least she’s looking at Chloe again. “I didn’t say anything!” she snaps. “I didn’t say I was in love with her! And even if she’s- come on, Chloe. Saying she’s not real doesn’t change anything, not now.” 

She’s right, but Chloe’s about to say she’s wrong anyway, until Rachel goes on to mutter under her breath, “Everyone falls in love with things that aren’t real, anyway.”

Chloe nearly hits the curb and just barely swerves off it. Rachel grunts at the sharpness of the turn. “Rachel, what the fuck- What does _that_ mean?”

“Nothing,” Rachel mutters, then suddenly her head whips around again, eyes bright and focused and narrow. “Fuck, that reminds me! You don’t get to be leading the interrogation, I wanted to talk to _you_! I wanted to ask you about that girl!”

“What the fuck-” Chloe begins, irritated and suspicious at Rachel’s changing the subject, but Rachel just talks over her. “That girl, that Max- you saw her again today, right? Outside the diner.”

And that gets Chloe to pause, thinking of Max, thinking maybe Rachel has picked up on something she hasn’t. “Yeah, what about it?”

“How many times have you seen her?” Rachel says intently, and it’s hard to drive under her stare. “In the diner twice, at the junkyard, and at the beach, right?”

That sounds right, but Chloe hesitates, the flashes of Max in moments her mind has made up interfering with clear memory. “Um, yeah, but why-”

Nodding once, firm, Rachel goes on, “And she’s our age-ish, right? Has anyone else ever seen her?”

These aren’t normal questions. This isn’t how Rachel asks about girls. “My mom did once, why are you-”

“Have you ever dreamed about her?” Rachel says. “Like, weird dreams?”

This isn’t how Rachel asks about girls. This is how Rachel asks about goddess bullshit.

Chloe parks so hard in her own driveway that she’s pretty sure she leaves a skid mark, and Rachel yelps, pressing her hands against the dash. “What the _fuck_ are you talking about? You think Max- shut the fuck up, this isn’t like it! Don’t make it weird!”

Rachel throws up her hands. “I’m not making it weird, you’re making it weird! I’m just asking about the girl!”

“No, you’re not!” Chloe says, and this is such a stupid thing to fight about, even as the words come tumbling out of her mouth she wishes they would stop. “She’s just a person- just a person I keep seeing, but if I start talking about her with you, you’re going to overanalyze it like you’ve done with everything else, and ruin- she’s just a person, Rachel!”

Her voice cracks, and they both stop.

Something’s so wrong about this.

“Why is this so important to you?” Rachel says, and there’s something nearly like wonderment in her voice. “You said you don’t even know her.”

“I _don’t_ ,” Chloe says, and she hates how rough her voice sounds, but it’s better than trembling. “I don’t know her. But it’s like- I know there’s weird shit going on, with her, but it’s not the same. It’s not your weird shit. It’s different.” 

It _is_ different. Max isn’t the same kind of strange as the creepy dread strange of Rachel’s cult, of death butterflies, of bloody-nosed dreams. She’s strange in a softer way.

Rachel wouldn’t understand. To her it’s all the same thing.

“Let’s just go,” Chloe says, and Rachel doesn’t protest, just gets out of the car, and that’s what tells Chloe she has to fucking do something, that what’s broken will become unfixable soon if she doesn’t.

\---

They check the house for any sign of David in total silence, Chloe listening anxiously for Rachel’s own footsteps as she patters about upstairs, stomach turning and nerves making her hands shake and knees twitch. 

She isn’t able to say anything when Rachel comes gliding back down the stairs again, tying her hair carelessly back with both hands. “I think we’re in the clear, Chlo. Garage, right?”

Chloe just nods, touching uncertainly to brush some hair out of her face. She does open her mouth, but Rachel’s already disappearing in the direction of the living room, and all Chloe can do is follow, her hands curling and uncurling as she traces Rachel’s easy steps into the garage.

When she gets there, Rachel’s already going through the shelves, bent and focused on the endless line of soup cans. “So where is it?”

“Top shelf,” Chloe says, and her voice stutters a little bit but she’s pretty sure only she notices, “over there, behind the rat poison,” and then, “hey, Rachel,” but when Rachel looks up her voice goes small and meaningless again. 

Rachel just grins at her, a little tentative, and straightens up again. “You gonna help me get up there?”

Wordlessly, Chloe kicks over a stepladder, and Rachel smiles more sure at her this time, wheels it over to where Chloe had pointed and buries her head behind yellow boxes.

This is something Chloe has to fucking do. She’s lost enough of Rachel already.

“Listen,” Chloe says, and the knot in her stomach could be anxiety, or nausea, or something even more inset than either, something old and intrinsic that Chloe can’t get rid of. “I love you, Rachel.”

Rachel doesn’t even pause. Just keeps rummaging around the shelf, head tucked out of sight. “Yeah, of course. I love you too.”

God, she’s going to be sick about this. “No, I mean,” and she’s not going to say _in love_. Chloe’s not like that. That’s not how she and Rachel are. “I mean I love you.”

There’s the soft bonk of Rachel’s head against the top of the cabinet, and then she withdraws it, slow, to look down at Chloe from the ladder’s second step. The box is in her hands, but that doesn’t really matter right now. Chloe bites her lips but holds her gaze, hands curling into fists by her side, the ache in her neck becoming more and more acute.

“No, you don’t,” Rachel says.

In all honesty, Chloe probably shouldn’t have expected any better. Still, it’s surprising- Rachel’s not usually one for flat denial. It nearly gets Chloe to lose her nerve. 

But she doesn’t. Not now. “What the fuck. Yes I do. You don’t get to say that I don’t, it’s not your-”

Her voice dies when Rachel’s head tilts, frowning, the sun outlining her dark curves and honeygold hair in a bright halo. It stays cold in her throat when Rachel scales back down the ladder, slow, puts the box down on the ground carefully, takes two strides forward, and looks her square in the eyes, an inch or less between the two of them.

Only a squeak gets through Chloe’s mouth when Rachel glares at her, draws Chloe’s face up in both hands, and kisses her.

Obviously she’s a good kisser. Chloe knew she would be. This is their first real kiss- Rachel has pecked her on the mouth before, chaste, but that doesn’t count- but Chloe’s seen her kiss other people, for real, at parties and on the beach and other meaningless places. 

Now, though, Rachel tastes like she smells, sweet, and her mouth is soft and her hands are cold against her cheek and her nose is pressing intimately into the side of Chloe’s. It’s a great kiss. It’s exactly like Chloe always imagined it would be.

But somehow it still doesn’t feel right.

When Rachel pulls away, she’s still frowning, but she looks vindicated somehow, like she’s proved her point. “You tilted your head down,” she says.

Her hands are still cradling Chloe’s face. It takes her more than a second to respond, and even then it’s a sputtered, “What?”

“When I touched your face to kiss you, you tilted your head down,” Rachel says, and she takes her hands away. She doesn’t look mad, and Chloe wishes she did. She just looks perplexed. “I’m an inch taller than you. It’s not me. There’s someone else.”

They look at each other, Rachel in half-shadow and Chloe entirely in darkness. Chloe expects her to turn away, go back to searching the cabinets, but she doesn’t, so it’s to her face when Chloe says, “I- what are you talking about? Of course there’s no one else! There’s never been _anybody_ else!”

It’s the blunt truth of it that makes Rachel’s expression move from knowing to confused. She searches Chloe’s face, as if she’ll find a new answer there amongst old bitterness.

But it’s the same as it was when they first met. Chloe’s always been alone. 

“Chloe,” Rachel says, slow and uncertain, and she reaches for Chloe’s hand but Chloe takes a step back. Rachel doesn’t reach for her again. “Chloe, listen. I love you, you know that. But it’s not me. You’re trying to fill this hole with me, but it’s not- I’m not. I’ve always known that. I thought maybe you knew that too.”

Okay.

She had expected Rachel to say no, because in the end everyone says no. Chloe never expected Rachel to be an exception, had loved her better as a distraction. 

But this is the sorriest excuse-making she’s ever heard.

“Fuck this,” is the best she can do, does her best to emphasize the _enough_ and the _I’m leaving_ and the _fuck_ without letting her voice quiver, “fuck you, Rachel,” and Rachel calls after her when she goes hurrying out but she can’t hear what she says over the roaring in her ears.

\---

She doesn’t even mean to go to the lighthouse. She doesn’t really mean to go anywhere, other than away from Rachel and from this sense of unwantedness that will always inevitably catch up to her. But her feet have to carry her somewhere, and they end up carrying her up that red hill and past the green trees and finally to the huge white cylinder that eclipses the whole town.

And when she gets there, Max is sitting on the bench. 

Because of course she is. She wouldn’t be keeping up to character if she weren’t present, against all odds, to see Chloe fall the fuck apart.

She glances up when Chloe sits down hard next to her, but Chloe doesn’t look at her, just leans forward and buries her face in her hands. “Of course you’re here right now,” she mutters into her hands. “Of course.”

Max makes a small, curious noise, and through her fingers Chloe can see her shadow lean forward, peer a little into her face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Her palms are damp where they’re meeting her eyes. She doesn’t want Max to see. She wishes Max wasn’t here, wishes Max would leave her the fuck alone. “Nothing, just. You’re fucking strange, Max, anyone ever tell you that?” 

When Max laughs, it hits her square in the chest like it always does. “You have, a couple of times. Other than that…” Her shadow leans back, and the bench squeaks with rust as her back presses against it. “Do you want me to go?”

Of course she does, but Chloe doesn’t have the authority to send people anywhere. “No, it’s fine.” She rubs the heels of her hands, hard, into her eyes, until she sees stars. “Why are you here, though?”

“I don’t know. Just felt like looking at the sunset.” Chloe can feel Max’s gaze on her back, and presses harder against her own eyes. “If you don’t want me to leave, do you want to talk about it?”

Even if her eyes are rimmed red by now, Chloe doesn’t give a shit anymore. She sits up, fixes Max with a stare she’s sure is disbelieving. “Why would I want to talk about it with _you_?”

She feels a little bad when Max flinches, but only a little. Still, the girl stands her ground. She looks back at Chloe with a gaze too firm to be anything but genuine. “I care about you.”

Chloe laughs, a little hysterically, grips the bench beneath her with both hands and looks out to the sea. “God, isn’t that nice! It’s great so many people care about me. You and Rachel and my mom, you guys should form a club. Or do you already have one? Are the meetings always scheduled for when I need someone, and that’s why no one’s ever there?”

She glances at Max, only slightly, and has to look away because Max looks absolutely stricken and that’s just going to make her feel worse. She clenches the slats of the bench harder in both hands.

“Chloe,” Max says, voice so serious it makes Chloe sit up straighter, “what happened?”

That merits another laugh. “Nothing! That’s the problem, Max. Nothing ever happens. I reach out to people, and it’s always ‘this isn’t the right time, Chloe’ or ‘this isn’t what you want, Chloe’, like everyone knows me better than I do. Like anyone really knows me at all. And then when I don’t reach out, because no one ever wants to reach _back_ , it becomes my fault I’m alone. It becomes me shutting people out. I’m fucking tired of it.”

The sun is three-fourths of its weight beneath the horizon now, dabbing everything dark orange and red. It hurts to look directly at it, so that’s exactly what Chloe does. 

After nearly a minute, she thinks Max is so lost on what to say that maybe she won’t say anything at all. That’s fine with Chloe. She doesn’t look to the other side of the bench, doesn’t encourage her. 

But Max does say something, and when she speaks, her voice is strangled. “That’s really how you feel?”

“Fucking- of course it is, I’m not making this shit up!” Chloe says, and looks at her by accident before remembering she wasn’t supposed to. She immediately makes to look away again, but Max’s expression takes her aback- it’s slack with sadness, borderline horror, and her eyes are glittering so brightly in the red light that it’s enough to terrify Chloe. “Holy shit. Why do you care?”

“This isn’t what I-” Max says, rushed and genuine, then stops, and looks down at her own hands. “This isn’t right,” she mutters. “I thought I had-” She stops again, and looks back up at Chloe, eyes searching, hands still extended beyond her knees. “Chloe, I’m sorry if I’m overstepping my boundaries here, but I just want to help you. Do you feel like it’s because your dad died that your life is this way?”

Even if she had tried to soften it beforehand, the question is so blunt it knocks the air right out of Chloe’s chest. “How did you know-”

“You told me,” Max says impatiently, with enough vehemence that Chloe believes her even if she can’t remember ever saying so. “Do you think his death was a turning point for you?”

Chloe had been looking at Max’s hands- she always ends up looking at Max’s hands, whenever they meet, thin-fingered and elegant and pink-edged, like they blush. Now, when she looks toward her face, she fully intends to begin with a _fuck off_ and build from there, but really looking at her, at the determination on that face Chloe still can’t figure out, the bite of her voice settles back behind her teeth.

“I used to think it was because my dad died,” is what comes out of her mouth instead, without her permission or even much thought. It’s like the words have been sitting in her throat all this time, waiting for Max to ask the question to their answer, and now that she has the floodgates are opened. Chloe can’t stop them rushing forth. “Because obviously things went to shit after that. But the truth is, even when my dad was alive, I knew there was something missing. Like there was something… something that supposed to be there, that I was supposed to have, but I never found it and so I’m alone.”

She’s never said any of this, not to anyone, not even Rachel. She’s barely ever thought it. And yet it keeps spilling out of her, shaking and true, all the same.

It keeps coming. “And even now- Max, I know that really, there’s nothing wrong with my life. I know that. Joyce is a good mom and Rachel is a good friend and we have a nice house and even David’s not bad, I’m better off than most people are. But still, I-”

She’s been staring at a point just beyond Max’s face this whole time, but now she angles in on Max herself, and Max is staring back just as intently as before. She swallows, and goes on. “It feels like it’s missing something. I feel like I’m missing something. Rachel thinks it’s a person, but I don’t know any- it’s just that I know there’s supposed to be something in my life that’s just not there. Does that make sense?”

Max’s mouth is trembling, and Chloe doesn’t know why. She just hopes to God she doesn’t start crying.

But she doesn’t. She bites down on her lip, and lifts one hand up to her face to push some hair out of her eyes. Chloe watches the movement, and decides suddenly that she likes Max’s hands.

“I’m sorry, Chloe,” Max whispers, sounding a little choked but also like she’s doing her best to keep it together. Chloe appreciates that, she really does. “I wish- I wish you didn’t feel that way.”

The sun goes all the way beneath the shoreline, and the two of them are in darkness.

“Thanks, I guess,” Chloe says, for a lack of better things to say. “But, um. There’s nothing you can do about it, so you-”

Suddenly Max hits the right side of the bench, the side facing away from Chloe, hard, with one curled fist. Chloe jumps, and when she squints to see through the blueing night Max is crushing her bottom lip with her teeth. Out of nowhere, a cloud crosses the rising moon, and everything falls into pitch darkness.

For a moment Chloe is struck, more than ever, with the sense that Max is more than a girl.

“This isn’t _right_ ,” Max repeats, furious, still not looking at her. “You’re such a good person, Chloe. You don’t deserve to feel like this. You need to be happy.”

Chloe’s starting to get uneasy. She glances at Max again, at the shadowed moon, and stands up, brushing her hands against her knees casually for posterity’s sake. “Uh, thanks, Max. But, a-anyway, enough of this mushy shit. I need to get back home, Joyce’ll worry.”

“Okay,” Max says, still glaring at the ground, and stands up with her. “I’ll see you, then, I guess.”

Max is shorter than Chloe is. Chloe swallows. Against her better judgment, she says, “Max?”

Her voice quivers, and immediately all the anger goes out of Max’s face as she looks up, replaced with some sort of apologetic complacency. She smiles up at Chloe shakily, and even in the dark she’s lovely.

Chloe’s never thought of someone as _lovely_ before. It scares the hell out of her. “Max, listen. Why do you even give a shit about me? I’m just some waitress who’s kind of terrible all the time.” 

Max blinks at her in surprise, her face soft-edged and harmless in the moonlight, and suddenly Chloe wants very badly to kiss her, with no explanation and no rules and no reasoning behind it, and that’s scarier than the thought of any darkness and any storm and any omniscient deity ever conceived. 

“I love you, Chloe,” Max says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. 

All of the breath is knocked out of Chloe’s chest, but Max just smiles up at her like it’s something she should already know, eyes shining and huge in the light of the moon.

Chloe’s voice cracks when she tries at, “Max, what-”

“Chloe!”

She spins around, startled, and Rachel is hurrying up the path, David’s fucking grey creep box still clutched under her arm. She comes to a screeching halt right in front of Chloe and immediately leans over, panting. “God, I can’t believe you made me run all this way,” and then she looks up, eyes wide. “Chloe, listen, I’m sor-”

But Chloe’s not listening. She spins back the full one eighty degrees, holding her breath.

Max is gone.

“Chloe?” Rachel says, and Chloe feels her fingers touch at her elbow. 

She jerks it out of her reach. “No, shut up- Max was here, she was here and she- fuck!”

And without thinking, she runs to the very edge of the cliff, right where Max went toppling off the side in her very first nightmare, silent and ghostlike, like she’ll be waiting at the bottom

But she isn’t there either. She’s just gone. Chloe lets out a shaky breath, leaning over a little farther to look. 

Then suddenly, arms are around her waist, and Rachel is physically lifting her off her feet, dragging her away from the cliffside, and Chloe screams and slaps at her hands but Rachel doesn’t let go until they’re a good fifty feet away from the edge. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What the fuck are _you_ doing?” Rachel screams back, putting Chloe back down on her feet and spinning her around by the shoulders to glare into her face. “Are you fucking insane? What’s going on?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Chloe yells, and their faces are so close together and it’s too fucking dark and it feels like a million years ago since Rachel kissed her in the Price’s oil-stinking garage. “Max was- and you- why the fuck are you here?”

“To fucking apologize!” Rachel shouts back, eyes small and furious in the faint moonlight. “To come apologize to you, again, because I was a jackass and because you keep running away from all your fucking problems and because we can’t fucking create boundaries to save our lives, and you’re here, having this vision no one else is having, and acting like this will all just go away if you just ignore it when we both fucking know it won’t!”

There’s a moment of silence, of Chloe equating _vision_ with _Max_. “Is that what this is fucking about?” she says. “You- god. God, this isn’t fucking worth it.” She rakes a hand through her hair, then meets Rachel’s eyes again, scalp stinging where she had scraped against it. “Do you want me to fucking tell you, Rachel? Will that make you happy? If I tell you about Max? And the fucking dreams and how they make me bleed and how they won’t leave me alone like you won’t leave me alone and how they’re just getting worse? And then you can write it all down and forget it was me who told you and forget any of this ever happened and we never have to talk about it again. Is that what you want?”

The silence shouldn’t be as long as it is. Rachel always knows exactly what she wants.

“Will that fix anything?” Rachel says, and she still sounds mad but her voice is shaking, just slightly, almost under control but not quite.

Chloe throws her hands up in the air. “I don’t fucking know!” she says. “But you don’t know either! Neither of us understand anything, I’m sick of both of us thinking one knows more than the other when we don’t fucking know anything and we’re both just waiting for something to go right! Do you want me to tell you or not?”

She only hesitates for another second. “Yes,” Rachel breathes.

And Chloe is about to open her mouth, but then Rachel continues, “But no! Not yet. We need to- to- to cool off. Um. Come- come by the church tomorrow at one.”

“The _church_?” Chloe repeats, incredulous. “Are you kidding me?”

“It’ll just be us, I’ll have sent everyone away by then,” Rachel says, hurried, tripping over words. “I just- please, Chloe. Tomorrow, and it’ll be just us, and then it’ll all be over. I promise.”

Rachel doesn’t love her. But she does keep her promises.

Chloe grits her teeth. “Fine,” she says, and starts stalking away.

“Let me stay with you tonight,” Rachel calls after her, but she doesn’t chase her down, so Chloe doesn’t say yes.

She gets home, and ignores Joyce’s shout of greeting, ignores David’s glare, goes up to her room and slams the door.

She doesn’t sleep. Rachel texts her at one forty-seven am.

**Rachel** : chloe i do love you

Chloe deletes the message.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to mostlymilkwood (Amy) for beta'ing! Next update might take a while - I have a lot of projects going on, I'm going back to school, and the next chapter is going to be SUPER long, so hang tight!

Chloe’s eyes hurt from keeping herself awake. Lying still on the bed for hours is making her stiff and sore, arms folded under her head and legs stretched out, but every time she thinks about moving just makes her feel nauseous.

She can’t stand the waiting. She’s never been able to stand it. It drives her crazy, thinking about how _this_ is the way all the goddess girls go about their life, doing nothing and doing nothing and doing nothing and just waiting for something to happen when there’s no guarantee anything ever will. She doesn’t know how they’ve been able to spend months like this, just waiting.

And now Chloe’s stuck this way too, and it feels like every other waiting game she’s ever played, long and pained and pointless.

At least the goddess girls knew what they were getting into when they signed up for this bullshit. Ready to wait, ready to look inside themselves. Chloe’s never wanted to do either, and now she’s wrapped up tighter in this mess than anyone else. 

Always alone with your own thoughts. She doesn’t know how to live like this.

_I love you. No, you don’t._

She grits her teeth, draws her knees up into a tent, closes her forearms up around her face.

_I love you, Chloe._

That’s what finally pushes her into sitting up, elbows coming to rest on her knees, wincing when her spine cracks as it curves upwards.

Nothing about Max has ever added up, but this takes the fucking cake. Sitting there at the lighthouse as though she knew Chloe would come, disappearing off the cliff with no trace just as Rachel shows up, _again_ , vanishing just like she does in dreams. The tight, furious sadness on her face as she listened to Chloe whine, as if she actually gave a shit. Telling Chloe she loves her. 

None of it makes sense. No matter how many chance encounters they’ve had in the last month, Max and Chloe are strangers. Max knows next to nothing about Chloe, and Chloe knows even less about her. Even if Max is one of those overly dramatic Good Samaritan types, that doesn’t begin to explain how she just appears and disappears, always when Chloe’s at her absolute shit worst, always fading in and out with nice words that ultimately mean nothing but keep Chloe confused and unsettled.

Her fingernails are digging hard into her own scalp already when suddenly she wonders if she’s just making Max up. 

For a second it’s laughable; then she thinks about it, and it’s really the first explanation that begins to makes sense. _Chloe, you sorry, sad piece of shit, you already know your head’s been fucked from hell and back. Compared and to butterflies and nosebleeds and death, an imaginary friend is small beans._

It even sounds like something Chloe’s head would do to her. Make up a small, pretty, safe girl that shows up whenever Chloe’s alone and tells Chloe she loves her even though she doesn’t have any reason to. 

No reason other than Chloe just wants someone to love her.

Everything is so, so fucked up. Chloe’s literally losing her mind. The goddess and Rachel and her own fucking head, all conspiring against her. 

She looks over at her alarm clock. It’s eleven. She’s been awake in bed for thirteen hours.

Rachel had said to come to the church at one. It’s not like Chloe’s eager to go out and meet her and embarrass herself again, unspool her brain and let Rachel pick it apart and find exactly what she wants to find while they don’t look at each other, don’t talk, but she can’t sit here and think about how she’s gone crazy any longer either.

Her clothes from yesterday are still on, wrinkled and smelling strongly and unpleasantly of the sea breeze, but she can’t find the energy or the interest to change out of them. She just tugs at the waistband of her jeans and at the collar of her flannel before pulling her boots on, reaching mechanically for a beanie and pulling it sloppily over her hair. 

She grabs her keys and her phone, and Rachel’s texted her again but she doesn’t bother to read it. At this point, thinking about anything is going to make her head hurt. 

So she doesn’t think, not about how her breath feels sour and thick in her mouth or how her knees crack and groan as they make their way down stairs or how her lips are so dry they hurt, how everything hurts. 

She’s already reaching for the doorknob when Joyce calls out from the kitchen, “Chloe, you’ve been in that room all day! I thought maybe you’d died.”

“Ha ha,” she calls back, hollow. The front door’s locked. That means David’s home.

Joyce shouts again as she’s undoing the bolt. “You hungry, baby?”

Her hands are shaking and she doesn’t know why. She hates that there’s no reason. She hates this. “No, Mom.”

There’s a pause, and Chloe finally manages to hold still long enough to turn the deadlock, but just as she does Joyce comes shuffling out of the kitchen. “Not hungry? Who are you and what have you done with my daughter?” She touches at Chloe’s shoulder to turn her around, and Chloe does, reluctant but too tired to disobey. “Are you feelin’ all right?”

Her tone is teasing, eyebrow raised, but there’s a concern in her eyes too serious for Chloe to look back at. She averts her gaze, then bats Joyce’s hand away when it goes reaching for her forehead. “No, I’m fine-”

“Chloe!”

Her hand goes white-knuckled around the doorknob. David. 

Chloe’s life really can’t get any worse.

There’s no time to slip out from under Joyce’s arm and out the door, so Chloe just has to stand there trapped as David emerges from around the living room, red in the face and breathing like a bull. He steamrolls right through Joyce’s “David?” without even looking at her, keeping his eyes locked on Chloe. “The box! Where is it?”

She’d forgotten about the fucking box. Her eyes narrow. “What box?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Chloe,” he snarls, and when she just glares harder he waves both hands in the air, “the box in the garage, with the recoveries from the Jefferson bust- I know you had your hands on it. Where is it.”

“I don’t know where the fucking box is,” Chloe says, because she doesn’t, not technically, and she ignores Joyce’s warning look, just keeps glaring back at him. “Go bark up another tree.”

“ _Bullshit_!” David shouts, and he’s more flushed than she’s ever seen him, nearly purple, mustache bristling, ignoring Joyce’s sharp reprimand of “David!” again. “Who else would have taken it? You and your freaky cult friends, snooping around for-” 

Chloe’s about to snap something back about how if that were even true, they’d be better detectives than David’s ever been, but then she stops. “Wait. Why do you think the church would want your Jefferson shit?”

David’s quivering mouth snaps shut, and suddenly he looks caught, captured. The reproach goes out of Joyce’s face too, and she looks between the two of them, bewildered.

In an attempt to recover, David blusters, “Well-”

“No!” Chloe says, because she finally has the upper hand, for once she has control over the situation. “No, David, what the fuck was in that box? Why do you think your Jefferson shit has anything to do with-”

But then she gets it, because there’s only one answer to the question, really, and she feels herself go even colder, enough to make her bones ache, the blood draining out of her face. “Holy shit,” she breathes. “You’ve been seeing shit too. Like Rachel said, with Jefferson, and you- that’s why you’re so fucking paranoid! That’s why you’re so freaked out. Rachel was right, Jefferson and the goddess were connected and you _know_ it.”

She wants him to turn even redder. She wants him to yell, and tell her she’s wrong. At least that would be something that hasn’t changed.

Instead, most of the color goes out of his face. He glances, uncertainly, at Joyce, before looking to Chloe again, and Chloe’s stomach turns over. 

Even fucking _David_.

“Fuck,” is the best she can manage, shaky and gasping as it comes out of her lungs, “fuck this,” and Joyce reaches briefly at her arm as she slams the door open but it’s not enough to make Chloe stay. 

It takes her four tries to fit her key into ignition, and two to start the car. She thinks she’ll be relieved when she pulls out of the driveway, but she’s not. 

There’s no escaping this.

Chloe’s going to suffocate. 

\---

The fifteen minute drive to the church ends up taking Chloe nearly an hour and a half. She can’t drive. She can’t see straight. Her hands are shaking and her stomach hurts and she has to keep pulling over to get out and walk around, just walk in circles until she thinks it’s safe to get back in the car and keep going for another few minutes.

At one point when she’s driving past the woods, she thinks she sees a deer, just standing amongst the red leaves, just watching, and she nearly swerves off the cliffside. She has to pull over again, white knuckled and breathing hard, and when she looks back up in the trees there’s nothing there.

There’s nothing there.

This time when Chloe gets out of her car, she keels over, braces her hands on her knees and retches, but she hasn’t eaten in nearly a day and it’s dry. Just choking and choking on air with nothing to give. She can’t breathe and she can’t stop shaking and she can’t even throw up.

This is how people die. 

She gets back into the car, hits the horn five times, then keeps going. 

\---

There are a lot of cars gathered outside the church by the time Chloe gets there, and it makes her want to lay down on the seat of her car and not get up again.

It’s ten minutes to one, though, so there’s still time for them all to leave. Rachel had said no one would be there at one, so Chloe leans back against the seat of her car and closes her eyes.

More waiting. 

Fifteen minutes of it.

No cars have left.

Twenty minutes. 

No one’s even come out.

Twenty-five minutes. 

And the thing is, even though she’s pissed and jittery and feeling half-dead, Chloe could sit in this car and keep waiting for people to leave for hours. She has nowhere to go, not home and not to the diner and not to the beach and not to the lighthouse. She can wait here, as long as it takes, for the church to empty out, for it to just be Rachel and her. 

No one else gets to be privy to Chloe spilling her guts. She’s not exactly thrilled Rachel’s going to be there for it, either, but she’s determined to keep the invitation exclusive. 

But it’s when another car drives up and parks a few feet away from Chloe’s truck, Dana Ward hopping out of the front seat and untangling her foot from the seatbelt before hurrying through the huge sheet metal doors, that Chloe starts feeling like something’s not right. 

She hesitates, but after waiting another three minutes after Dana disappears inside with no results, she slowly climbs out of her truck, does her best to walk in a straight line to the warehouse doors. Clenches both hands into tight fists, fingernails digging painfully into her palms.

The doors aren’t heavy, but they’re hard to push with closed hands, and as soon as they’re open Chloe’s hit with a burst of noise and energy, heat from bodies and the high, bright sound of laughter and eagerness.

There’s a _ton_ of people running around the church, all girls, talking excitedly amongst themselves and hurrying from table to table, picking up drawings and journals and looking at them before snatching them up to compare with someone else. Everyone’s all lit up in harsh colors underneath the coldly shining stained glass, blue and red, light dancing over hair and skin and paper, and at the center of the warehouse is a large, teeming clump of bodies, circling around and whispering over something too far away for Chloe to make out.

She can’t see Rachel anywhere. 

After looking around the rest of the church, quick and cursory to each altar and each whispering set of girls, Chloe heads towards the center of the room, towards the center of the crowd, because that’s always where Rachel is most likely to be.

The other girls don’t pay her too much mind, distracted by one another and whatever’s going on. It’s strange to see them like this, happy and enthusiastic without an undercurrent of trepidation under it, and it seems wrong that Rachel isn’t immediately obvious amongst this outbreak of excitement.

It’s only when Chloe pauses just outside of the throng at the center of the room, unsure and suddenly anxious, that someone notices her. “Chloe?”

Even though it’s not Rachel, Chloe still turns, because she can trust Kate, she knows she can. Kate’s looking at her in surprise, hair tumbling slightly out of its bun and hugging a journal to her chest. “Kate, hey.”

“Hello,” Kate says, and her voice is welcoming even as she gazes curiously at Chloe, then around her. “What are you doing here? Looking for Rachel?”

“Yes,” Chloe says immediately, almost relieved. “She’s here, right?”

Kate nods, but she looks a little distracted. She comes forward, starts to move through the crowd with ease, and Chloe follows her, eager for answer, acknowledgement. “Well, yes, she’s got to be around here somewhere, I just saw her.” Then she shakes her head, coming to a stop in the middle of the bustling ring. There’s a white-clothed table at the center of it, another altar, and a bunch of girls are leaning over it, just whispering, staring at something laid out on its surface. “Sorry, I’m kind of frazzled. Everyone is. Let me go see if I can find-”

But Chloe’s stopped listening. She’d leaned over, mildly and stupidly curious, to look at whatever it was on the table getting everyone all riled up. At first when it’s just a drawing, she’s disappointed. Then she sees the subject.

Weirdly, the first thing she feels is relief, because if a drawing of Max exists then Max must exist too, somewhere outside of Chloe’s brain, she must be real. And it definitely is a portrait of Max, not a perfect one but it can’t be anyone else- Max in profile, hair slipping slightly in front of her face, freckled and frowning with that sad look in her eyes. It’s done in pen, kind of simple on a small piece of opaque paper, and there’s not a lot of detail but there was clearly a lot of effort. For a moment Chloe’s just staring at it, frozen, as the girls move and whisper and giggle around her.

Then the dread sets in.

“Kate-” but Kate’s disappeared, and Chloe wasn’t listening so she doesn’t know to where, and without Kate and Rachel Chloe doesn’t have anyone specific to call out for. 

But there are a lot of girls here, and Chloe knows for a fact by now that depending on Rachel to have all the answers is useless. "Hey," Chloe says, still staring at the drawing, and the girls' excited chatter is so incessant she has to raise her voice. "Hey! Who drew this?" 

The laughter and talk barely subsides, but a head bobs from the back of the crowd and moves forward and becomes Rachel, Rachel beaming with excitement, Rachel out of place. Her eyes go a little keener at the sight of Chloe, and Chloe’s original plan is to ask what the fuck is happening, straightforward, but before she can Rachel hurries into, "Oh, Chloe! Have you seen the drawing, isn't it great? Daniel!" 

At her call, a round, pleasant-faced Hispanic boy is ushered forward by the girls, looking shy. Rachel presents him to Chloe, still looking oddly sharp, eyes flitting all about Chloe’s face. "Daniel drew it. Didn't he do an amazing job?"

"It was nothing," the professed Daniel says, ducking his head. "There were so many sketches made before me by the others, and the portrait came to me so naturally! It was almost like I had already-" 

"This is of Max, isn’t it?” Chloe demands. She has zero interest in Daniel's artistic process and a lot in why all this excitement is surrounding a picture of a mysterious but ultimately unknowable girl, someone who tells Chloe she loves her and is just as insubstantial and impossible as saying so. "How do you know her? What do you know about her?" 

She doesn't realize until she's done speaking that all the girls have gone quiet. They're all staring at her now, their faces still and eyes wide, and when Chloe glances back Rachel and Daniel their frozen expressions are almost identical. Daniel's mouth is even a little open. 

"What?" she says, tight, nervous. 

No one answers. Rachel is looking between Chloe and the drawing of Max, forehead creased, like she's on the verge of solving some difficult problem. She doesn't speak either. She’s nodding to herself a little bit.

More than a little creeped out, Chloe snaps, "Hey! Someone answer!" 

"Who's Max?" says a voice from the back of the crowd, tentatively. It sounds like Alyssa, but no one moves so Chloe can't tell. 

Chloe stares at all of them, but that's all she gets. Brooke even shakes her head slightly, meeting Chloe's gaze from under her eyelashes. 

"What the fuck do you- this is Max!" Chloe says, gesturing towards the ballpoint drawing without looking at it. "The girl in the thing you’re all so fucking excited about! Short girl, brown hair, likes pancakes and creeping around town? Christ, someone must know her if you've got her sketched out like this, why are you all looking at me like-" 

Cool fingers touch the soft of her elbow, and when she looks to their owner, Rachel is looking at her as though she's never seen Chloe before. "Chloe," she says, as slow as to a child who's just Not Getting a concept. "That drawing. We didn't do it of a person. That's our best idea of what the goddess looks like." 

Her gaze is too intense for Chloe to quite meet her eyes. Instead, she looks back at the girls, who haven't stopped staring. Daniel's looking at the portrait again, curiously. "But- that's Max," she says, stupidly. 

Someone in the crowd whispers, "Is that the goddess's real name?" and there are some murmurs of assent, familiarity. From the back of the room, a quiet voice Chloe doesn’t recognize whispers, “So is she- is Chloe- she can’t be-”

That's when Chloe fucking loses it. 

"You're out of your goddamn minds!" she shouts, and pulls away from Rachel when the fingers on her arm start to tighten. "No, get off- is this some kind of- of fucking- setup? Because if it is, holy shit, you've spent a long time pulling this one off. All this goddess shit- journals and pins and glass and- I can't believe it! And you're trying to tell me Max is her now. That girl from the _diner_. You’re fucked up." 

None of the girls respond, but they don't look shocked anymore. They're starting to look unsettled, uncomfortable, and they're all glancing at each other and murmuring the name Max over and over, like it's a new holy incantation. Chloe wishes at least one of them would look pissed off at having her religion insulted. She wants a good fight. 

"Chloe," Rachel says softly, and she doesn't touch her again but her voice is so gentle she might as well be embracing her. "Can you tell me about Max now, at least? When exactly did you meet her? What's she like?" 

Turning back to face her, to not face the rest of the wide-eyed cult, Chloe says automatically, "What the fuck? Did you fucking-" Then it dawns on her. “This- this was all you, wasn’t it. You fucking set this up. The drawing, and Max, telling me yesterday- holy shit. _Shit_.” 

“No, I-” Rachel starts, but whatever she’s going to say is going to be a lie. Rachel’s started lying to her.

Chloe runs both hands through her hair, hard, her fingernails dragging ragged and painful against the skin. “Oh my god,” she mutters, then pitches her voice up. “‘Come to church tomorrow, Chloe- it’ll just be me and you, I just want to talk to you, Chloe-’ bullshit! Bull-fucking-shit, Rachel, you lied to my fucking face! ‘Just tell me about the girl, Chloe, is she nice, do you like her-’ what the fuck! What’s your fucking damage, Rachel, what did I _ever_ do to you?”

She can’t even feel sorry for the rest of the church girls and Daniel, standing there and watching them in horrified silence. They’re all in on it too. This was a long time coming.

Rachel isn’t saying anything. Just watching her.

“And Max, fucking Max-” Chloe goes on, and her voice is going higher and higher and soon it’s going to be gone. “Who is she, who knows her, who fucking did this- god, and _you_ did this to me, you took her and you-”

She falters, there, the train screeching through her head finally hitting a head, and that’s when Rachel speaks again, gripping her arm again in a vise. "Tell me what she’s like," she says intently. "What is she _like_ , Chloe?" 

Soft. Small. The beach and the lighthouse and nice hands and sad eyes and that laugh Max had laughed in the café. Someone holding her, someone holding her hand-

"Chloe."

It's not Rachel's voice that says her name. Chloe snaps out of it.

The first thing she realizes is that she has a major headache. The second thing is that Max is here. 

The sunset is putting her slightly in shadow, but it's definitely her. She’s in a T-shirt and hoodie and jeans, like always, and she looks so small against other people, so small against the huge stained glass portraiture lighting through her with red. She stands at the front of the goddess group as though she's been there all along, even though none of them have moved an inch. In fact, they've all gone even deader silent. 

There’s nowhere for her to have come from, except out of nothingness.

Rachel has frozen to the spot. Her mouth is open. Chloe’s not looking at her. She’s just staring at Max.

Max holds a hand out to Chloe, her face unreadable. "Come somewhere with me," she says. "We need to talk."

Her hand is thin, like it’s been all along, pink at the edges and slightly calloused. The sight of it is familiar, and Chloe inches back from it. “Oh my _god_ ,” she whispers, and her voice cracks.

Hand still extended, Max’s eyes are so round looking at her, big enough to hold so much sorrow. “Chloe, I fucked up,” she says, “I’m so-”

“No!” Chloe says, because whatever Max says now is going to prove Rachel right and Chloe wrong and ruin the one mystery in Chloe’s life she thought was harmless. 

She means to say this, to yell at Max, or Rachel maybe, for doing this to her over and over and over and fucking _hurting_ her. At Rachel for going away, even when she was still here. At Max for being the goddess, for being a deer and a butterfly and the rain and birds and the quiet on the beach and the loneliness in her own eyes and for making Chloe bleed. 

“It can’t be you,” is what she ends up saying, more broken than she should. “It can’t.”

Max looks like she might cry. “Chloe, I’m not-”

“Shut up!” Chloe roars, her voice breaking hard to reach pitch again, and she goes to push at Max, shove at her, something, but she falls short because she won’t touch her, she can’t, what if her hand goes right through? “You’re not the fucking goddess! You’re not- you’re not fucking real, you just- god, at the lighthouse, and I thought-”

Max doesn’t interrupt her. She just presses her trembling lips tighter together, and keeps reaching out.

Chloe’s head is swimming. For the first time, she’d be relieved if she woke up right now, if she was mistaking real life for a dream. For once she’d be relieved to not know the difference. “All this time, and you- you’re not the fucking goddess, Max! You’re not her and you’re not even real. You don’t love me-”

“Of course I do,” Max says sharply.

The room goes even stiller than before. It’s an impenetrable silence, one that can only break by shattering. Chloe’s eyes stop swimming just enough to see that everyone is staring at Max, except Max, who is still just looking at her. Just looking at her, eyebrows creased and eyes narrow, almost angry, still sad, still reaching out for her.

“You what?” says a cracked voice from the left. 

Both their gazes move sidewards, leftwards, onto a shellshocked Rachel, who’s looking between the two of them with eyes wider than Chloe has ever seen. 

Inexplicably, Max’s expression warms. "Hello, Rachel. It's really nice to meet you." 

Rachel's expression is a cross between pure shock and pure wonder. After a moment of stunned silence, she blurts out, "Oh my _god_!" Then she flushes. "I mean-" 

Max laughs, the sound creating the same painful feeling in Chloe's chest that it always does. Then she moves forward two steps, crouches down a little to look at the portrait on the table. "Wow, Daniel, is this me? It's amazing! The best one yet."

Daniel's mouth forms words, but nothing comes out. Max smiles fondly at him, then straightens up, looks back at the gaggle of girls behind Chloe and Rachel with a wistfulness on her face Chloe’s seen there too many times before.

From somewhere over Chloe’s shoulder, she hears Kate Marsh say, shakily, “You- you’re really-”

And Max’s face just melts, from its gentle somberness to something much younger, something vulnerable and unguarded, eyes scrunching up and smiling like it hurts. “Oh, _Kate_ ,” she says, and moves forward, and Kate stumbles backwards a little when Max throws her arms around her neck.

Uncertain, surprised motion sweeps through all the girls, but still none of them speak. Chloe and Rachel are still frozen in place, watching as Kate uncertainly lifts her hands to touch at Max’s shoulder blades, face so slack with shock she almost looks afraid.

Then Max lets her go again, smiling with damp eyes and squeezing Kate’s shoulders. She doesn’t say anything else to her, just looks over the rest of the girls again, then turns back, to Chloe and Rachel.

They both straighten, and Max looks at both of them, gentle and careful, but when she moves forward she goes to Rachel first. Max is shorter than she is, and she comes very close, and Chloe can see the moment Rachel stops breathing, just staring down at Max like she’ll never see anything like her again. Max briefly touches Rachel's shoulder, stands on tiptoes to whisper in her ear. 

The unadulterated awe in Rachel’s face is too much for Chloe to even look at, it hurts, it’s fucking wrong. So she looks at Max instead, as if that’s a solution to the problem, at how she is still so small even though she doesn’t have to be, even though she’s not a fucking person at all.

She’s not real. Nothing was real.

“I will,” Rachel says breathily, “I promise,” and that snaps Chloe’s attention back onto the two of them, long enough to see Max smile gently at Rachel, go back down on her toes. She lets go of Rachel’s shoulder, and, looking dazed, Rachel touches her face.

Max lets her, is patient. Then she nods to Rachel and turns away, back to Chloe, and reaches out again. "Let's go."

Chloe is already reaching for her hand, even as she says, “What if I don’t want to?”

Their fingers are a millimeter from touching, but Max doesn’t close the distance. She doesn’t look away from Chloe’s eyes. “I’ll never make you do anything you don’t want to do,” she says, “but if you don’t come with me now, I won’t be able to explain anything, and you’ll never see me again.”

That’s what finally breaks the silence of the goddess girls, and the room erupts into gasps and cries. Without even thinking, Chloe’s hand closes over Max’s palm, and suddenly they’re beneath the lighthouse.

Hands still clutched together, Chloe is winded, by movement and by shock, by the fact that Max, tiny quiet Max who skulks around and takes up so little space that the secrets she hides inside herself must be small, has _teleported_ them here, is the _goddess_ , and she has a thousand questions and she’s so confused and furious and hurt, hurting, but the first thing she says is, “Why here?”

“This is where it all started,” Max says simply. She lets go of Chloe’s hand, clasps both of hers behind her back, and starts wandering, slow, towards the bench. “You know, people are all wrong about time. It’s not linear, but it’s not a circle either. It’s like, um… a quilt, kind of. Made up of tons of tiny moments. Tiny places, and people. And it’s not defined by anything but loss.” She looks over her shoulder to where Chloe still stands, stock-still, in the shadow of the tower. “Do you want to sit?”


	8. Chapter Eight

In the sunset, Max is a paradox. The light is shining right through her, like glass, but still there's a girl-shaped shadow falling across the bench, across Chloe's thighs. 

She's looking straight at the ocean. "I wish I could say I did all of this for you," she says. "But this is so much bigger than either of us."

Chloe wants to say, _bigger than you? You're the fucking goddess_. Instead, what she says is, "Why the fuck would you do anything for me?" 

That turns Max's head, and there's another paradox in how she looks at Chloe, confused yet still knowing. “You really don’t know," she says, disbelieving. "Can't you feel it?"

This is what Chloe can feel: the heat of the sun, the rough wood of the bench against her bare back, the weight of Max's gaze. "Feel what?" 

"I love you," Max says. "I meant it when I said so before. I love you more than anything."

It could just be Chloe's imagination or it could just be the world standing still (if a goddess can love Chloe, surely she can stop the world turning), but in that moment everything goes silent. Max's fingers come tapping, slow, across her knuckles. She doesn't make Chloe hold her hand. 

"I told you before," Max says, and her voice is low, pained. "Back when I saw you here yesterday, but also before I became... this. I knew when I did it that you'd forget that I was there, but I hoped... I thought maybe you'd still feel it, inside yourself. That I loved you." Her fingers curl, and neither of them look at each other. "You knew me. You loved me too.”

“I don’t know you,” Chloe says. “I don’t know you, we’ve barely met, I don’t love you.”

Max closes her eyes. “I know,” she says. “I know you don’t.”

It almost makes Chloe want to apologize, the heavy way she says it, but before she can say anything Max just shakes her head, opening her eyes again.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Max says. “I know it’s all my fault. I know I hurt you, and you’re confused and scared, and I’m so, _so_ sorry, Chloe. But I’m going to make this right, I promise. I just want to tell you why-”

Chloe hates it when people promise her things. She hates Max too.

“No,” she says, “no,” and she’s shaking her head to deny this but also to clear her thoughts, to get her pulse to stop blasting pain across her thoughts. “No, first you’re gonna answer my questions, because I am fucking sick of being in the dark. Then you can tell me whatever you want to tell me.”

She hates the way Max acquiesces without so much as a frown. Just “okay” and waiting silence, an expectant gaze in Chloe’s direction. 

Chloe wonders what Max really looks like, if she made herself small and pretty to lure Chloe into a false sense of security, or seduce her, or something. She decides just not to look at her. “What’s your real name?”

“It’s Max,” and when Chloe glares at her, she says insistently, “it’s always been Max, Chloe. Maxine, but. No one calls me that.”

Which is a weird thing to say, because Chloe’s pretty sure, since she’s really the goddess, no one calls Max anything. But it’s enough of an answer to keep moving on. “How old are you?”

There’s a split second of hesitation before Max says, “Eighteen.”

“Don’t lie,” Chloe says. Sharp, unforgiving. 

Max’s hands press flat against the bench, knuckles whitening. “It’s not the easiest thing to explain, Chloe,” she says, and there’s a little bite in her words. It startles Chloe as much as it relieves her, to finally know Max feels emotions the way a person does, before she remembers Max isn’t a person. “I _should_ be eighteen, but I’m… the way I am now, I exist outside of time. I don’t have a real age anymore.”

This is too fucking much, this wasn’t anything Chloe ever wanted to know. “What do you mean, you should be eighteen? What the fuck does that mean?”

Finally, finally Max looks away from her. Chloe is at once relieved and wishing she would meet her gaze again. “It wasn’t always this way,” Max whispers. “I was a normal person once. I was eighteen. I looked like this. All I did was take pictures.” 

“When?” Chloe says, glaring at her own knees. “How? Are you like- a fucking ghost, or like- shit. Shit. This doesn’t make any _sense_.”

“I know it doesn’t,” Max says hurriedly. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s so much to explain. There’s so much to tell you. I don’t know where to start so that you’ll understand.”

“How come?” Chloe bites out. “Because I’m fucking stupid? Because you’re the goddess and I’m just some- some fucking-”

Max is already shaking her head. “Because I barely understand it myself,” she says, and her voice is patient and Chloe hates it. Like Chloe’s a child; like this is an unconditional love. “You know how sometimes you know things even if you don’t understand them? This is just one of the things I just… know. It’s just how things are.”

That isn’t a very celestial thing to say, and it only irritates Chloe more, the idea that Max is copping out on her because she thinks Chloe won’t be able to handle whatever secrets are still locked behind Max’s mouth. “Fuck you, Max.”

Max doesn’t even flinch, just nods like she agrees. “I think the best way to explain it,” she goes on, without looking at Chloe, “is to say that, um, this timeline, your reality- this is a restart. A rewrite, sort of. But this is _my_ original timeline.”

All those words make sense by themselves. “A restart?” Chloe repeats. “Your- your original timeline? What the fuck are you talking about?”

Minutely, Max glances at her, then quickly away when Chloe glares. Her hands touch at each other, uncertainly, twisting in her lap. “Um,” she says, then giggles once, short and rueful. “Once upon a time-”

“Fuck _off_!” Chloe snaps, sitting up so straight and cursing so hard she nearly loses her balance on the bench. “Don’t act like we’re fucking friends! You- you’ve been lying to me for weeks, I’ve been losing my mind for _weeks_ and it’s all your fucking fault! If you’re going to explain to me what’s happening then you better _explain_ before I fucking kill you.”

She means it too, for a second she really means it. Max’s hands clench around themselves, white knuckled. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay. Here’s what it is. I used to exist in this timeline as a regular person. You were my best friend. I was a photography student. Then, um… something happened. Or, well. Something happened to me. And to you.”

Another life. Max there. Chloe doesn’t want this. “What the fuck is _something_?”

Max nods a little, frowning. “You know the time-space continuum?” she says, and Chloe nods even though she doesn’t know it, really. “Well, it’s like- it’s hard to explain in language. There’s no words for it. But it’s like there’s a hole. There’s a hole in the continuum, and that’s Arcadia Bay. Time is broken here. It always has been. It keeps trying to close the hole, but every time it makes an attempt at balance, it just collapses in on itself. I-” She closes her eyes. “I was given this power- it was random, I wasn’t chosen, it just happened. But I didn’t understand- I didn’t understand anything, Chloe, I was just a teenager then.” She smiles, but it’s so hollow. “Strange attractor. But I didn’t fix anything, I just made things worse. I made the hole bigger. I didn’t know what was happening, Chloe. I didn’t know things were as broken as they were.” 

Chloe gets up, off the bench. Max stays where she is, keeps her eyes closed, keeps her hands clenched around the wood slats.

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Chloe says, and turns away from Max, sort of hoping she’ll disappear.

Her voice comes floating up to Chloe anyway, small and wispy on the seabreeze. “I know.”

“You can’t even prove it,” Chloe says, and kicks a rock, sharp and swift, over the edge of the cliff. It goes sailing, and she feels sick.

“No.”

“So why the fuck should I believe you?”

She turns to look at Max again, and Max is still sitting on the bench but her eyes are open now, just gazing forward ahead of her. Looking sad and sure like she always does. “Chloe,” she says. “You know it’s true.”

And she doesn’t, she doesn’t, she doesn’t know Max and Max isn’t her best friend and Arcadia Bay is just a shit town where things don’t happen because it doesn’t matter, nothing in this town fucking matters. 

“You’re not,” Chloe says, and swallows, and looks away from her again to kick another rock. “You’re not a real person. You’re not my best friend.”

She hates the crack in Max’s voice when she says, “I used to-”

“I don’t care, you’re _not_!” Chloe barks, and stalks seven paces forth, two paces back, runs both her hands through her hair and winces when they run over where her nails had cut into her scalp before. “You told me you’re not real, you just told me that! What even are you, if you’re not a real person and you’re not my best friend and you’re just something I dream about that fucks with my head?”

It’s not any easier to not look at her. It’s not easier to have gotten up and moved, it’s not easier to kick the side of the lighthouse so hard the pain reverberates all the way up her leg. It doesn’t distract from the ache in her head, in her ribs. It’s not enough, nothing is enough.

“I’m Arcadia Bay,” Max says simply. Chloe looks back at her for one second, and she’s still staring at the ground. Her lips are pressed tightly together when she’s not speaking, like she’s trying to hold herself back. “I’m all of it now. Holding it all together, filling all the cracks. All of it, from the beginning to the end, the trees and the ocean and every living thing, everything and everyone that’s ever existed and will ever exist here- I can see all of it. I’m all of it.” She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath through her nose, a still sort of calmness on her face as she senses something Chloe can’t. “There’s so much, Chloe, there’s so much emotion and age and knowledge here. It’s so huge, I can’t even begin to explain it. It’s overwhelming.” Then she opens her eyes again. “Sometimes I wish you could feel it too.”

“I don’t want to,” Chloe says immediately, “I don’t want any of this.” 

Max just nods, and her hands unclasp from the bench and it looks like she’s going to get up. Scared, suddenly, by the prospect of her motion, Chloe blurts out, “Why, though?”

Now Max glances at her, meets her eyes, and Chloe bites the inside of her cheek so hard she can taste blood. Max is leaning a little too far off the bench, it almost looks awkward, but the curves of her body are all sharp, all right angles, like everything in her is always coming back to the earth. 

“I know you’re so lonely, Chloe,” Max says, soft and unjudging. “I know you are, and I know it hurts, and I thought you wouldn’t be after I did this, I did everything so that you would be-”

“Shut the fuck up, don’t read my goddamn mind,” Chloe says, wretched, and presses her toes hard against the lighthouse again, enough to feel the dull burn of a forming bruise without making another one. In her peripheral vision, she sees Max frown and open her mouth again, but she hurries across her to keep speaking. “Max, I don’t care- I don’t care if you’re a goddess, or-or the fucking town, or whatever you are or whatever you think you are, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, you don’t fucking know me.”

There’s some kind of sharp movement of Max’s head that makes Chloe look back at her, and now Max is looking at her nearly vicious, a dark sort of look in her eyes that makes Chloe swallow. “Yes, I do,” she says.

And actually, if Chloe were to try to identify this feeling, it lines up closest with fear. She wonders, with all of the talk of love, if Max could actually hurt her. She wonders if she can get Max to hurt her. Break all of this. “No, you fucking don’t.”

“Yes I fucking _do_ ,” Max says, and she glares at Chloe before closing her eyes. “You were born here, in this town, and you screamed all the way up until your dad held you for the first time. You learned to ride a bike when you were five and you wanted to learn how to skateboard first but your mom said it wasn’t as safe.”

Chloe’s mouth is so dry that it hurts to say, “Shut up.”

Max shakes her head, eyes still closed. “You’re scared of the deep sea even though you like the ocean because of that giant squid documentary you saw in the fifth grade. Your favorite color is blue now even though when you were younger it was white. You used to play the Smiths all the fucking time in your room even though you say they’re overhyped garbage now. When William passed away, you and Joyce didn’t talk to each other for almost three weeks. Your first kiss was with a guy in the Blackwell parking lot six months to the day that your dad died, and you lost your virginity to him too. Same parking lot. You were sick afterwards. You’ve never told anyone.”

“Shut the fuck up-”

“You met Rachel when you were sixteen and a half,” Max says, soft. Her eyes are scrunched shut now. “You really were… thinking about killing yourself. Because of her, you didn’t. You, um, you love her.”

“ _Max_ -!”

She shakes her head hard, her whole face screwed up like she’s focusing. “Two and a half months left,” she whispers. “Rachel does keep her promise, Chloe. You know she will. You get out of town. You never come back. You do call Joyce sometimes, and you tell her you’re happy. I think you really- I think you really are. You go all over, you say you have a lot of adventures, um, you meet-”

Chloe’s not sure when she started moving, only that Max cuts off on the word _meet_ because Chloe’s grabbed her by the hair, fisted her hand in it, and pulled her up by the roots, savage. Max hisses, surprise or pain Chloe can’t really tell, and grabs Chloe’s wrist with both hands, but she’s so tiny anyway that Chloe nearly pulls her right up into the air.

The last time their faces were this close, Chloe had wanted to kiss her.

“Shut up or I’ll kill you,” she says.

“Let go of me,” Max says.

Chloe’s hand unclenches from Max’s hair, and Max falls back down, lightfooted, onto the earth, from where she’d been on her toes. She blinks owlishly at Chloe for a second, then just shakes her head again, looks down again and moves forward and past her in small, slow steps. Like she had at the beach. 

There’s a long, long silence between them. Chloe is facing the empty bench. Max must be facing the sun.

“How do you know all that?” Chloe says, and hopes Max doesn’t answer, hopes that she’s gone.

She’s not. “Some of it I know because you told me,” Max says. “When we were together. Other parts because I saw it happen. I told you, everything in Arcadia Bay, everything that’s ever happened or will happen, I see it.”

“Doesn’t that- wouldn’t that drive you insane?”

There’s a huff of breath behind her. It sounds almost like a laugh, but somehow Chloe feels like she knows better at this point. “It did for a while,” Max says. “Now I’m just tired.”

Chloe’s chest aches. She can’t figure out which part of her body hurts the most. She turns and looks at Max, and Max is facing the horizon, standing at cliff’s edge, hands clasped behind her back.

“Get away from there,” Chloe says, before she can stop herself.

Max looks over her shoulder at her, curious but a little bit knowing, and obliges, takes two steps back from where the rocks jut out into air. Not far enough away.

Chloe tries to look away from her again, focus on words, focus on understanding this goddamn bitch of a situation. “Tired of what?”

“Existing,” Max says. 

“Max, I swear to god,” Chloe says, and her voice fucking breaks, the blunt of her nails digging into the grooves already formed in her palm, “get away from the edge of the cliff right now.”

This time when Max looks over her shoulder, she’s surprised, then startled. She turns on her heel, and hurries over to where Chloe is, and there are rocks in her path but she doesn’t stumble once and it makes Chloe’s stomach turn. Max’s brow is furrowed again, and it’s only when her hands hover uncertainly over Chloe’s upper arms that Chloe realizes that she’s shaking, her whole body. As soon as she realizes that, she also realizes that she feels like she might pass out.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Max is humming, and her brows are drawn downward but she won’t touch Chloe, not even now. “Come on, it’s okay. Let’s sit down, all right?”

Instinct has Chloe nearly tell her to go fuck herself, but her knees are telling her Max is probably right. Max moves forward with her, hands guiding still without touching, and when Chloe collapses down heavy on the bench Max eases herself down with her, looking at her intently, carefully.

“You’re so fucked up,” Chloe mutters, bending nearly all the way down, head almost between her knees, “showing up and doing this to me just to fuck me up-”

“I didn’t mean to fuck you up, I swear,” Max says quickly. “I know this is my fault, but I swear I never meant to hurt you, I promise.”

“Then what did you want?” Chloe asks her knees, cupping her hands behind her head and accidentally sending her beanie sliding almost over her eyes. “Coming to the diner that first day- that’s what fucked everything up, isn’t it? That’s when things got really bad. You must’ve known it would happen.”

In her peripheral vision, she can see the muscles of Max’s thigh go tense. “I didn’t know,” she says. “I should’ve. But I really didn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. If I’d known you were thinking about the goddess, I wouldn’t have-”

But Chloe cuts across her, looking up so fast she goes lightheaded again for a second. “You can’t tell what I’m thinking?”

Max looks back at her, surprised. But Chloe’s surprised too; all this time spent with Max in her head, she’d started figuring that Max must live there. It would make more sense than Max just knowing her.

Still, Max just chuckles, rueful. “I’ve never been able to tell what you’re thinking,” she says. “Maybe things would be better if I could. But I thought you didn’t pay the goddess thing any attention, because you always just dismissed it when Rachel brought it up. I didn’t know you actually thought it was something real-”

“Of course I did!” Chloe says, a little irritated, a little embarrassed at having been caught thinking about the goddess, who is really Max, who is really someone Chloe has thought about as both girl and goddess too much. “I’m not stupid! And it fucking scared me! More than it did any of the cult girls, they all thought it was this amazing mystical thing, even when they were all seeing the storm and death and horrible shit. I knew it would have been better if they just left all of this alone-”

She regrets saying so as soon as she looks at Max’s face, because Max doesn’t look stricken or hurt. Max just looks like she agrees. She’s looking back down at the ground, hands curled into fists on both sides, and she looks guilty and tired and too old for her young face. “I know,” she says, and her voice is heavy. “It’s because you know me better than they do. Even if you don’t remember, you know better than anyone that when I was here- people only got hurt when I was a real person. It’s better that I’m this way now. It’s better that people don’t know I’m there.”

Even if she’s right and Chloe doesn’t remember, it still sounds so wrong for Max to say so, and it makes Chloe want to say she’s wrong. But the truth is Chloe can’t remember, and what Max is saying could be true, and Chloe can’t say anything to refute it.

So instead what she says is, “So why did you start showing up, then? If it wasn’t just to fuck with me?”

That just makes Max look even guiltier. “Um. That first day in the diner… I just wanted to see you. Talk to you again, just once. But I fucked up. I shouldn’t have done it in the first place, and then it got worse, because you went to the church and they told you all this shit about me on the same day we saw each other again- I mean, for the first time. We were too close together, you found out a lot of things you shouldn’t have known, because you’re not supposed to remember me. That’s how this timeline stays stable, you not knowing me. So because of that, the reality started to get fractured. There were already cracks in it where people could sense me, and that’s how the goddess cult got started, but I had it under control until- until you.”

So it’s Chloe’s fault, then. “Until me. Right.”

Oblivious to the flat crack in her voice, Max just keeps going. “It’s just because- to keep you and everyone else safe, I sort of- plugged myself into the timestream, right? But it wasn’t enough, there was other stuff I still had to fix, like Rachel and Kate and-”

“What do you mean?” Chloe says sharply. “What do you mean, you had to fix Rachel?”

Max just closes her eyes. “In the life where I was with you,” she says, “Mark Jefferson murdered Rachel Amber. About six months ago. You and I spent a week looking for her, and we- we found her body. Buried in the junkyard.”

The junkyard. Rachel in the ground, rotting and filthy, the dream where Chloe had screamed and sobbed and somebody she couldn’t see and couldn’t know had held her. “Rachel died?” she says, and her voice is so small that it’s painful to push the words out of her throat. “That was real?” Then, “Wait, so, that day, that day in the junkyard-”

“I didn’t mean to, Chloe, I swear I didn’t mean to fuck things up like this,” Max says, and she shouldn’t be glittering and choked with tears, she’s not a real person. “I just- I never wanted you to know. I never wanted that to happen to you. To her. So- so even though I wasn’t supposed to be changing things anymore, I sent Victoria a vision, back in the winter, of what happened in my reality, so she would find out Nathan and Jefferson, and Rachel and Kate would be safe. But that’s how- that’s how people started sensing me as the goddess. Because I interfered with the timeline, even just a little, my reality started to, um- echo? In this one. But that was the only time I ever sent someone a vision on purpose, Chloe, I swear. Everything else was- people seeing through the cracks. To the time when I was there. I never- it wasn’t me, sending those visions that hurt you. I wasn’t doing that to you. It was my fault but I wasn’t doing it on purpose.” 

But Chloe’s still stuck on this. “But Rachel… she really died? And- and Kate, and- Jesus, everyone else who keeps seeing-” 

“The storm,” Max finishes. “Yes.” Then, softly, “A lot of people died, Chloe. Because of what I did.”

Death and butterflies. The lighthouse and the cliff and Max falling like a martyr. “Did you die?” Chloe says timidly. 

The smile that ghosts faintly across Max’s lips is anything but happy. “Not enough, apparently,” she says. “Maybe that’s what you thought you saw, back then, but- what happened was I just stopped being. I was there, and then I was gone. Like I never had been.”

Even if it’s only half of a faded memory and not even something real, Chloe can still see Max tumbling like a nightmare off the edge, and it still brings her heart into her throat. But she has to move beyond that now. “Did I… did I die?”

Just the way Max bites her lips tells Chloe the answer. “Not just once,” Max whispers. “So many times, and I- I kept trying to save you, but it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.” Her hands have curled up into her lap, tight and shaking. “I thought, when I saved you the first time, it was destiny for us to be together, but…” She breathes in deep, and smiles up at Chloe again, eyes glistening. “I guess it was my destiny to save you. That’s okay, though. That’s okay too.”

They need to get off this topic right now. Chloe feels like if Max looks at her like that for another second, smiling with tears in her eyes and an untouchable longing in her face, they’ll never be able to leave this lighthouse. Time will stop right here.

So she hurries back into the defensive. “Then what about those other times- the diner and the junkyard and-and the beach, and the lighthouse?” 

Somehow this doesn’t seem to distract Max from her sadness. She does look away though, which is something, and starts counting off on her fingers. “The diner the second time… I couldn’t help it. Because you dreamed about me. Everyone dreamed about their own deaths, but you… it startled me, you remembered what happened to me. I went back to see you again without thinking. The junkyard- I was trying to warn you, so you wouldn’t remember what happened to Rachel. And the beach and the lighthouse…” She pauses, here, fingertips resting lightly atop one another. “I just didn’t want you to feel alone. It wasn’t smart, but… I knew you needed someone. So I wanted to be there for you.”

It makes sense, this, that someone wanting to be there for Chloe would break all of time and space. She shouldn’t have expected any less.

She keeps going. “But- but that day outside the diner, with Rachel and the church patrons- you were fucking with me then, weren’t you?” 

Max just shakes her head, hands now clasping each other, tight, in her lap. “I didn’t mean to be,” she says softly. “I didn’t even mean for you to see me, I just- the church patrons, the Caulfields? They’re my parents. Or they were, in another life. It’s hard to- explain. Because they’re not anymore.”

Jesus Christ. “Your parents?”

She nods, a little jerkily. “I know they told you they live in Seattle now. When they lived in Arcadia Bay, in this timeline, I was watching over them, and I still felt connected to them, but… they left five years ago. And I don’t have any presence anywhere other than here. I can’t see them there, in the city. They feel so far away from me now.” Her eyes close, but her brow remains scrunched with strain. “I was outside the diner that day because I just wanted to be close to them again. I miss them.”

Chloe wants to touch her. Chloe wishes she wasn’t here, was anywhere but here. “I still don’t fucking understand- why can’t you be with them? All this time shit- why did you do it? Why can’t you be a real fucking person? You’re like one right now!”

Opening her eyes again, Max uncurls her hands, places them on either side of the bench. Chloe’s palm goes gentle over her fingers, and Max looks at her, a little surprised, a little hopeful. Then her eyes go sad again.

“I just can’t,” Max says, and at first Chloe thinks she means she won’t tell Chloe the truth, but then she goes on. “That was the sacrifice I made. I can’t be with people anymore, I can’t live in the world like a person does. I can’t be with the people I love.” Her fingers curl a little, knuckles sharp, under Chloe’s hand. “I can’t be with you.”

This is what wakes Chloe up from this- this facsimile of a painting of a dream- the coupling of the words _love_ and _you_ , said for the hundredth time out of Max’s mouth like they’re supposed to go together. That doesn’t happen to Chloe. This isn’t something that really happens.

Her hand has closed tighter on Max’s hand without her really thinking about it, and Max looks at her again but doesn’t speak. Chloe does instead, just rolls her shoulders, keeps her voice even as possible. “I’m sorry, Max. I’m really sorry, even though- I still don’t totally get it? But you at least got something out of it, right? I mean, you’re a goddess now.”

Max looks away, forehead creased, and pulls out of Chloe's grip. "I'm not a goddess."

"Yes, you fucking are!" Chloe snarls, and here is where it finally snaps for her. "And not just any goddess, _the_ goddess! There are tons of people just- devoted to you, and you can control time and space- what do you think that makes you?"

Arms coming up to hug her sides, Max glares at her. "I didn't ask for any of that! It’s not who I am, I'm just- I'm just-" She closes her head, tilts her head up to the sky. "I'm just a teenager."

But Chloe's fucking mad now, angry again. She's not taking this whole woe-is-me bullshit anymore. "Then what was all-" She does the hand-stick-out thing Max is always doing, in drawings and paintings and to bring the two of them here to the lighthouse. Obviously nothing happens. "All this? Teenagers can't do that, Max! Gods can! And- and-"

Her face is hot and damp with something. If it's tears and not blood she's going to be furious. "And if you're the goddess, and I’m your- your fucking mortal beloved, or some shit, like they said, like you said, then where the fuck have you been, huh? Why's my life as shitty as it is? I needed someone, and you haven't been here! You aren't here for me! Just the beach, and the lighthouse- it isn’t enough, that’s not what I needed!"

That seems to strike a nerve, and Max winces. "Chloe," she says, and her voice is so soft, so sad. "There's so much about all this you don't know. There's a lot I don't understand. But you have to know, I've been trying so hard. I've been trying so hard for you. I just want you to be happy."

No one's ever said something like that to Chloe. Who would? It's easy to disbelieve. "Well, good fucking job of that, what the hell have you done! I’ve been alone all this time, you just said so yourself, until Rachel, and even Rachel’s not-”

All of a sudden, she’s struck with memory, so visceral and vivid it’s as though she’s really fourteen, standing in the hallway, and saying, _you have made everything better, like, my whole life_ -

But that never happened. No one was there when she was fourteen, and she sure as hell never talked to herself-

Her head is pounding so hard she thinks it might burst. “That didn’t happen,” she whispers. “This isn’t real.”

Suddenly Max is touching her, tilting her head up, and Chloe jerks back so violently she nearly falls off the bench. Max quickly lifts her hands up in complacence, in surrender, but she looks startled in a way that isn’t just explained by Chloe’s jumpy movement.

Two drops of blood fall on Chloe’s jeans and soak right through. It takes her a second to realize they’ve come from her nose, and she drags the back of her hand against it, stares at the streak of red left behind her skin. “This-”

“It’s happening again,” Max whispers. Her eyes are filled with fear in a way no goddess’s should be. “The storm- this has to be the last time.”

Chloe just blinks at her for a second, hand still held aloft and bloodstained. “What’s happening again? I thought you said the storm- the storm or whatever it is, you made it go away.”

"No," Max says, and leans back in the seat, closes her eyes and lets the sun wash over her. "The storm’s still there, outside of time. I’m holding it back even now."

She's so beautiful. Not like a painting, not like a goddess. Like a human. Like an art student. Like a girl Chloe could fall in love with. "So why- how are you here?" 

Max's eyes flicked open, her eyes on the orange sky. "I’m part of time now,” she says. “Time resonates, Chloe. It’s like energy. You can’t destroy it, only remodel it. And I’m like a sentient time distortion, like a patch over a hole. But I always have to be there, I always have to be outside of reality filling that hole, or the storm will come through and everything will get fucked again. Even now I’m still inside of time and out, there’s a part of me that’s still in the continuum holding the storm back. But it’s like- every time I leave to come talk to you, the hole gets bigger, because I’m not- focusing. So I can’t come back anymore, I have to go. I have to stay outside of time." 

Even as she says so, Chloe can see her slipping more and more into transparency, becoming more projection than person. "Wait," she says, sounding more desperate than she intends to, "wait. You said you knew it was dangerous, but you kept coming anyway, why-"

"I did it so we could be together," Max says, her voice paper-thin. "Even just for a moment. I only meant for it to be once, that day in the diner when you saw me-” Her voice cracks. “When you saw me for the first time. It was selfish, and I'm sorry. But I wanted you to know I was here. I wanted you to know that I love you."

_You are all that matters to me_.

“I know,” Chloe says, without meaning to, and when Max’s head whips around, when she looks at her in fresh shock, she presses her hand over her mouth. “Oh. Oh, Christ, stop doing this!”

The surprise fades from Max’s eyes, and she looks away, bottom lip growing tight between her teeth. Her hands are gripping the last slat of the bench with white knuckles again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’ll be over soon, I promise.”

Even if Chloe’s head is pounding and her nose and mouth are warm with blood and now words are coming out of her mouth without her permission or memory, suddenly her whole body and mind goes clear and icy cold. “You’re really going to leave?”

“I won’t be gone from Arcadia Bay,” Max says, not looking at her. “But I won’t be able to meet with you like this anymore. Assume a corporeal form, any of that.”

When Chloe says, “But I don’t want you to go,” the feeling is old but the words are new. She means to say them. Even now, for whatever reason, she doesn’t want to not see Max again, not hear her laugh again.

This time when Max looks at her, she’s surprised again but fond, wistful. She’s leaning forward, over her thighs, and Chloe swallows when their eyes meet.

“I don’t want to go,” she says, and slow, tentative, she reaches out one hand to cup Chloe’s cheek. Chloe lets her, holds herself still when that warm hand touches her skin, doesn’t dare lean into it for fear of falling through. “I didn’t want to leave you, Chloe, not ever. But keeping you alive is the most important thing. I’d give myself up a thousand times for that. I would and I have.” Her thumb strokes across Chloe’s face. “Don’t cry.”

She didn’t know she was crying. She’d forgotten. She almost moves to reach up and touch her face, then decides to stay still, keep looking at Max, keep the moment frozen here. “How could you ever do that?” she whispers. “For a fuckup like me?”

Max’s brow creases, and she stands up, her hand never leaving Chloe’s face. She shifts, just so she can come to stand directly in front of her, and leans down. Chloe closes her eyes, and when she does she can feel skin against skin, Max’s forehead against hers.

Then, suddenly, emotion hits her like a car crash, all-consuming and overwhelming, not in a wave but in a wreck. From where Max is touching her all the way down to her toes, she can feel _something_ potent enough to get lost in forever, a Chloe-shaped feeling so huge in magnitude it’s as though nothing else could possibly exist to contest it.

Even when it fades off, Max exhaling against her face, Chloe can still feel it, shaking in her bones, hot in her ribcage where the heart beats. She drags in a shuddering breath. “Max-”

“That’s how I feel about you,” Max whispers. “That’s why I don’t regret this, I never have. Don’t forget it, Chloe Price.” She chuckles, damp. “But forget about me, okay.”

Then the feeling of her is gone.

When Chloe opens her eyes, she’s sitting on her bed at home, and she’s all alone. Her phone is beside her, buzzing incessantly, and there’s no pain left, not in her hands or heart or head or anywhere else. There’s nothing left.


	9. Chapter Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Bri, Amy, and Kaelin for beta'ing!!

Chloe’s room is stiflingly warm, it’s exactly the way she left it, and it makes her feel so out of place for a second she’s not even sure she’s real.

Her phone buzzes under her hand again, and automatically she lifts it, checks the glowing screen. Her eyes sting when she looks at the light. 

**Rachel Amber** \- (112 Text Messages)

The most recent three line up neat at the top of Chloe’s phone, increasing in urgency from the bottom up and interspersed with a couple of numbers the device doesn’t recognize. Other goddess girls who suddenly care about Chloe’s shit, no doubt. 

**Rachel** : chloe PLEASE

**Rachel** : dude fucking text me back i’m serious

**Rachel** : i’m fucking scared okay tell her i need you to come back

She thinks Chloe and Max are still together.

Chloe’s hands are shaking, hard, and it’s taken her seven tries and forty seconds to tap in the first two digits of her passcode before a new text pops up at the top of the screen.

**14342224948** : hey chloe its juliet again listen if the goddess is still with you i NEED you to ask her--

There’s a second ding as the follow-up text comes through, followed only a split second later by the shattering crash of Chloe’s phone hitting the opposite wall, top speed.

It stops buzzing when it’s hit the ground, and Chloe doesn’t care if she’s broken it or not. She hopes she has, she hopes the screen and the cover and the multitude of girls’ voices humming through it are in fucking pieces.

There’s no sound of reprimand from downstairs at the crash, no David or Joyce. She’s totally alone. 

_You’ll never see me again._

So she screams, and for a moment she curls up into the sound, squeezing her eyes shut and blocking her own ears from the sound she makes. Then, after a moment, it’s not enough to try to contain the red hot hollow thing in the center of her chest.

So suddenly she’s on her feet, pacing around the room, picking things up in her hands and smashing them and hearing Max’s voice as glass fragments against her hands, the walls. 

A picture frame. _You were my best friend_.

Her lamp. _I know you’re so lonely, Chloe_.

Her snowglobe. I can’t be with you. 

A book, wrinkled and torn, flying across the room. _I love you. I love you. I love you_.

Suddenly there’s something bulky and unfamiliar between her fingers, and she almost, almost goes to throw it without looking, but the glint of dust in sunlight catches her eye.

It’s her father’s camera.

_I want you to have it_.

It startles her, the sound of her own voice rather than Max’s. It takes her a second to even realize the words were in her head, almost like memory, but somehow less tangible and stronger than one, both at once. The camera clicks against her nails as she looks up, squeezing it between her hands so hard she thinks her palms might bruise.

Max is there.

But she’s not there, not really. There’s something about her that seems superficial, sort of holographic, like it’s just a projection of a moment playing from somewhere on Chloe’s ceiling. 

She’s smiling, though.

Chloe’s camera is in Max’s hands, even though Chloe can still feel it clutched between her own, and she’s smiling bemusedly, she’s saying, “I can’t take this,” in a way that echoes across Chloe’s skull. There’s a sunlit glow to her, the edges of her body, and she seems young and happy like she never did when she was with Chloe in real life.

Chloe just stands there frozen. After a second, the half-memory of Max pulls the half-memory of a camera closer to her chest again, her grin spreading wider as she looks down at it. “Of course it’s cool,” she says, and dimly Chloe is aware of a dull, thunking pain in her head that resonates in time with Max’s words, but she can’t focus on anything other than this, the image of Max small and carefree, the sound of her voice. “This camera is so sweet. Thank you.” 

She looks up at Chloe again, and she’s beaming, like she has nothing to be sad about. Like she’s just genuinely happy.

Then she flickers, a little, and laughs, eyes happy and bright, falling back a little on her heels. “You’re _crazy_.”

And then she’s gone.

For a second, Chloe stands frozen. Then, small, “Max.”

No answer.

“Max?”

Nothing. 

She looks frantically back down at her camera, as if there’s an answer there. It’s in her hands, as surely as it was in Max’s, and it’s dusty and old and hasn’t passed hands in years because Chloe doesn’t like pictures much, never has, always gave her a weird feeling. 

But Max had liked them. 

Max had held this camera in her own hands. Chloe had _given_ it to her, the camera that belonged to her father, she’d given it to Max as though Max was worth it, as if just her smile was worth it.

Whatever that had been, that tiny non-memory of a life that never existed, that was the first time Chloe has ever heard Max laugh.

She doesn’t realize she’s collapsing until the pain reverberates up her knees, she doesn’t realize she’s crying until her lungs burn at inhaling, and this is really the first time since she was fifteen that she really, truly wants to not be alive.

After about another hour, she wakes up in the fetal position, curled around her camera on the floor, and her back hurts and her heart hurts and her eyes sting. She’s not feeling courageous, but she’s also not feeling anything at all, so now is probably a good a time as any to go find Rachel.

She doesn’t wear a seatbelt, not ever, but she does put it over her father’s camera, delicately, in the passenger seat of her car, before zooming towards the Two Whales.

\---

Rachel bangs out the side door the minute Chloe pulls up besides the diner, right on the side of the skinny road. It’s breaking at least three traffic laws, and four when Chloe’s inevitably an asshole about it to Officer Berry. She doesn’t care.

Chloe gets out of the car, and doesn’t move. Rachel stays frozen on the steps.

They’re silent for a second.

“I thought you were gone,” Rachel says. Her voice isn’t quiet, but it is shaking a tiny bit, like she’s only got it mostly under control. “I thought-”

“You knew,” Chloe says. She feels like the words should be angry, but they just sound dead. She doesn’t say anything else. 

Rachel shakes her head, violently, eyes huge. “I didn’t,” she says. “I swear I didn’t, I thought- Chloe, I didn’t know. You have to believe me, I didn’t know.” She glances all over Chloe’s face, then wets her lips, twice. “Where- where is she?”

As if Chloe was just going to show up hand in hand with her. As if Chloe could bring Max anywhere. “She left,” Chloe says hollowly. “She’s gone.”

That gets Rachel to nod, a little shakily, like she hadn’t expected any better. “Did- did she say anything about coming back?”

“She’s _gone_ , Rachel,” Chloe says, again, flat. “She’s not coming back.”

“Oh,” Rachel says, and for a second they just stand there, both staring at each other’s feet, Rachel’s hands curled into tense fists. Then she reaches for Chloe, slow, and Chloe doesn’t flinch back but she doesn’t move forward either. “Come in. Come inside.”

Chloe glances up. All the goddess girls are peering at them through the oval window of the diner, unabashedly staring, like they’re watching fish in a tank. Kate lifts her hand as if to wave, then when she can’t manage a smile to go along with it, presses it against the glass. Solidarity.

“I don’t have anything to say to them,” Chloe says. 

Rachel bites her lip, hard. “Chloe,” she says, and it’s that fucking voice, a little trembly but it’s still the voice she uses to get people to do whatever she wants. Chloe hates her for it. “Chloe, listen, I don’t understand any of this, but you’re the mortal beloved. You have to-”

The instinct to attack is dulled now, after her lungs have gone soft and tender already with tears and shouting, after the feeling of Max’s hair thin in her clenched fist. Still, she’s not taking this lying down. “Yeah? What do I have to do?”

And Rachel goes silent, and Chloe hates that too, hates that Max has so much power over Rachel that Chloe’s obstinence is enough to render her silent, when she should be telling Chloe what to do, like she always does. 

So Chloe rushes forward, with more words, filling the silence between them since she can’t bring herself to fill the space. “Okay, first of all, don’t ever- don’t ever call me that again. Second of all, I don’t owe you shit. I don’t owe any of you anything, I didn’t ask for this! I don’t want it!”

That gets Rachel to look at her again, something hard in her gaze this time. It’s almost comforting, that fierceness. “I know you don’t want it,” she says. “But this has been my whole life for months. You get in there, and I’ll buy you a coffee, and you can toss us a fucking bone, all right?”

“Aren’t you listening?” Chloe says, and her throat burns suddenly, but she’s not sure she even has enough tears in her to cry again, so she doesn’t bite down on it. “She’s fucking gone! There’s no point to any of this, she’s never coming back!”

The moon’s out, and very large, and it shifts behind a cloud when Chloe’s voice cracks. Rachel glances up at it, then down at her, and when their eyes meet again hers are softer.

“Just come inside, sweetheart,” she says, and Chloe wants to punch her and also to collapse in her arms and cry. “Just come inside, okay?”

There’s another fidgeting moment, then Chloe mutters, “fuck you,” and hurries up the steps, hands jammed in her pockets, shoving violently when Rachel tries to touch her arm. The door bangs like a hurricane when she goes through it, and all the girls inside scramble onto their feet, looking at Chloe like she’s something shiny and unstable.

Joyce isn’t here, and that’s enough to light the tiniest breath of relief in Chloe’s lungs. They must have switched places, diner to house, and she won’t pay witness to Chloe’s tokenization into a religious symbol.

Immediately, anxious voices pipe up, tentative but unashamed. 

“Where is she?” Brooke. 

“What happened?” Juliet. 

“Are you okay?” Kate.

Chloe closes her eyes. 

She’s pushed into a booth, most likely by Rachel, and when she opens her eyes all the girls are crowded around her, still standing, except Rachel, who sits across from her, legs and arms crossed. 

“She’s gone,” Chloe says. 

“Where?” is the immediate response, from somewhere in the back. Dana, sharp.

“I don’t fucking know,” Chloe says, leaning back. “Fucking- metaphysics and shit, she’s the whole damn town anyway, sentience-”

There’s an outcry, girls shouting over each other and pushing forward to get closer, and Chloe just closes her eyes again. Her head hurts.

Max is somewhere, listening to all this. 

Rachel is quiet, still. Just watching her. “Where’d she take you?” she asks, evenly, and the girls all quiet again.

Chloe opens her mouth, but then one of the girls squeaks in thought and she looks over. They all look guilty. Brooke elbows Kate, pointedly, and Kate winces but she looks up at Chloe anyway. She’s very pale, and her hair is falling out of her bun in hanks, and now when she looks at Chloe there’s something in her eyes like trepidation, something Chloe was always very careful not to put there.

For a second, Chloe can’t help but hate the goddess again.

“We thought maybe she had taken you away,” Kate says softly. “Like rapture.”

Rapture. Chloe almost laughs, but just the thought of it hurts her throat. “No.”

“Where did she take you?” Juliet whispers. Her small eyes are so wide it probably hurts. “The two of you just vanished out of-”

“The lighthouse,” Chloe says, already tired of the sound of her voice. 

That nearly sets the girls off again, but then Rachel says, “Why?” and there’s a pause. 

Chloe shakes her head. Saying what happened feels automatic, routine, but it also makes her kind of want to throw up, because this is making it real. “Um,” she says. “I- we’d been there before. In real life- god, yesterday, yesterday we’d been there together- but also before that- Jesus _fucking_ Christ, I can’t do this. I can’t explain this.”

She sinks back into the booth, rubs the palm of her hand over her face. Her skin is so dry. 

“Don’t make me talk about her,” she says. “I don’t understand any of it, I don’t understand anything, and she wasn’t-”

She doesn’t know how to say this, that Max is only for her, that the way she is and all her words are only for Chloe, without sounding like the mortal beloved. Without making it sound like Chloe loves her. So she just closes her eyes again.

There’s a long, long, awkward pause. 

Rachel’s voice, no closer than it had been before, says, “We can talk tomorrow. We’ve all been through a lot, I think we all need some time to rest.”

Some muttering, some sounds of shuffling. The door doesn’t open, or close.

So Chloe tacks on, without opening her eyes, “Go _away_.”

And that’s what does it. The door slams, feet patter. The world gets quieter in about forty-three seconds.

They’re all gone when she opens her eyes. Rachel’s just watching her, legs crossed, hands folded, eyes narrow. 

“So they’re listening to me and not you now?” Chloe says, letting her head loll back against the booth. “Guess that makes it official. The world is _completely_ fucked.”

Rachel doesn’t move. She says, “Chloe.”

It’s too much. Chloe closes her eyes again.

Both of them wait. 

Chloe goes first, because she’s tired of waiting for Rachel. “I need to get out of here,” she says. “Right now.”

And Rachel just nods, and makes to slide out of the booth, because she misunderstands.

“No,” Chloe says, and she makes a vague gesture, encompassing more than the diner, encompassing the window, encompassing everything. 

Rachel’s eyes flicker around, then she finishes standing up. “Okay.”

And they go. 

\---

Chloe’s driving. They’re both silent. 

There’s maybe about twelve dollars in the car, probably only a tiny bit more in Rachel’s bag. They don’t any changes of clothes either. Chloe doesn’t fucking care, she’s getting _out_ of this town.

She doesn’t have much gas, and the sky is dark and rumbling like a freight train. That doesn’t matter either. 

Rachel’s very quiet, which is what is most significant right now. Rachel’s rarely, rarely quiet, and she never ever lets Chloe take control unless she’s the one really in control and Chloe only thinks she’s calling the shots. So Chloe doesn’t like this, that Rachel’s quiet or that Chloe’s getting to make her own decisions or the fact that Max is watching her, always watching her, watching her drive out of town.

When she glances over at Rachel, though, she’s not looking at Chloe. She’s just staring at the road ahead, brow furrowed so deeply that she’d usually be complaining of wrinkles, lost in thought. Her makeup’s faded, her hair is hanging in clumps, and nothing is right, nothing makes sense. 

She’s driving out of town with Rachel forever and this still isn’t what she wants.

And it’s so much, she’s so busy being wrapped up in her own misery like always that she comes very very close to wrapping them around a huge fixture in the road before Rachel barks, “Chloe, _stop_!”

The brakes screech, about ten feet away from the huge-as-fuck oak tree lying on its side in the middle of the road, right in front of the peeling, ugly as sin LEAVING ARCADIA BAY sign.

It’s definitely immovable.

Chloe clutches the steering wheel, panting, staring at this monstrosity in the middle of the road and halfway out of her mind. Rain is hammering down on the car outside, and Rachel is breathing in short, sharp gasps next to her, clutching her bag to her chest. 

There’s no way out.

She hears Rachel say, “ _Chloe_!” again as she climbs out of the car, slamming the door behind her, but she doesn’t even turn. She just has to move this goddamn tree.

It’s cold out, in the rain, and the wet bark digs into her hands and scrapes when she pushes at it, but she keeps going. There’s blood on her hands, but she keeps going. She’s cold, soaking wet and shivering, and she feels like death, but she keeps going. 

The rain is so loud, cracking thunder, that she doesn’t even hear Rachel get out of the car. She doesn’t know how long it took her to get out, either- it feels like she’s been pushing at this tree for minutes, hours, and the rain’s certainly had enough time to soak right through to her bones. The only thing that gets through to her is Rachel, sharp, saying, “Chloe, stop,” again.

Chloe turns, but only to press her back, hard, against the fallen oak, trying even harder to make it budge. “Rachel, help me, we have to move this.”

But Rachel’s just standing there, blurry through the sheet of rain, arms hugged tight to her chest. “Chloe, we can’t move it.”

She just pushes harder, frustrated and heartbroken, splinters of wood digging into her back through her jacket, through her shirt. The anger starts to bleed back in. “Are you going to help me or not, Rachel?!”

“We can’t move it, Chloe!” Rachel yells, and now she comes forward, reaches out to Chloe but doesn’t touch her. Her hands just hang in the air. “We can’t move it. We’re stuck here.”

Her foot slips, against the wet gravel, and she nearly falls flat on her ass but just barely she manages to catch her herself. The wood scrapes hard against her back where she leans against it, against her hands where she pushes herself away. She looks down the tree, for some kind of weakness, then around, wildly, for the help Rachel isn’t going to give her. Then she turns up to the sky, the water stinging her eyes.

“Max!” she shrieks. “You fucking bitch! Let me _go_!”

That’s finally what gets Rachel to build up enough courage to come forward and touch Chloe, and fuck her, _fuck_ her for doing things for Max, who she’s never, ever, met or known in any timeline, when Chloe is her best friend everywhere and Rachel won’t do shit for her, she won’t even move this tree. Chloe shakes her off when Rachel’s fingers brush her forearm. “Stop! Max, you told me I get to leave, so let me _leave_! I hate this place! I hate-!”

Rachel grabs her by both arms now, and her hands slip against Chloe’s skin but she holds her there, fingernails digging painful into her skin. Chloe shoves at her, but she loses more of her own balance than Rachel loses hers. “Let go-!”

“No!” Rachel says, breathless, and doesn’t pull her forward but she doesn’t let her go. “Chloe, it’s not her. It’s not- Max. She didn’t put this here, if she loves you she wouldn’t put this here-” 

Chloe gapes for a second, then tugs out of her grip, violently. Rachel still doesn’t let go. “She doesn’t love me, if she loved me this wouldn’t be here, if she loved me _she’d_ be here!”

All of Rachel’s eyelashes have clumped together in the rain, her lip color is smudged, and she doesn’t look fierce. For once, she just looks as lost as Chloe always feels. “She didn’t put the tree here. The- Max didn’t put the tree here. It wasn’t her.”

They stare at each other, for a long, electric, filmy-with-rain second. Then Chloe’s face crumples, and Rachel finally lets her go.

She sits down, against the huge fallen tree, right there in the middle of the road, pulls her knees into her chest and cries. She thought there wasn’t any crying left in her, but apparently there’s always more. 

After a moment, she hears Rachel sit down next to her, onto the soaked street, and lean back against the tree. She doesn’t speak, for a while. Chloe doesn’t either. She hugs her knees closer to her chest, and buries her eyes more deeply in its bones.

Then Rachel says, “This is my fault.”

Chloe doesn’t respond, and she doesn’t look up either. It used to be Rachel’s fault, but now she’s not sure whose fault it is, but if Rachel wants to feel guilty then fine. At least they’ll have that in common again. 

But she follows it up with, “We have to fix this.”

It gets Chloe to unbury herself. There’s small comfort, looking at Rachel and seeing her messy and soaked and human, knowing that even if Chloe’s own face is stung red with tears and fury, one of them doesn’t look much better than the other. “You can’t.”

Rachel shakes her head, still looking forward, then tilts her gaze in Chloe’s direction. There’s something glassy about her, through the sheet of the storm, but the same old determination that’s always been there shines through. “I can’t do it by myself,” she says. “Chloe, we need to work together. We need to fix this.”

“We can’t fix it, she’s gone-”

“So we have to bring her back,” Rachel says. Like it’s that easy.

Chloe opens her mouth, to say we can’t again, but the look in Rachel’s eyes just tells her she’ll get shot down again. So instead she just sniffs, drags her hand across her face like a kid, and says, “Why should we?”

And if Rachel says anything like _because she’s the goddess_ or _because she loves you_ or any shit like that, it’s over. Chloe’s getting right back in her truck and driving through the tree. 

What Rachel says is, “Because I need to fix this for you.”

It’s the right answer, but it sounds too much like Max to be authentically Rachel. Still, when Chloe looks at her again, it’s the same face, the same thick shining hair sticking to her forehead. It’s Rachel. It’s a promise. 

So instead of _why_ , she says, “How?”

The question loosens Rachel’s resolve just a little bit, and she looks away, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. Chloe almost laughs, but instead she just chokes on it and ends up coughing. 

“Um,” Rachel says. “I’ll think of something. I just need time to sleep on it.”

Everything is so backwards. Chloe really does laugh this time, presses the heels of her hands into her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Sure, Rachel. Sleep on it.”

“I will!” Rachel says, indignant, then she giggles too, maybe a little hysterical. She stands up, and offers Chloe a hand. “We should go home.”

It’s not a question of _should_ ; they simply have no other choice. Chloe takes her hand anyway. “Yeah, okay.”

They get back into the car shivering, soaking whatever paper and plastic Chloe has kicked under the seats. Rachel starts combing through her hair with her fingers, dripping everywhere. Chloe turns on the ignition.

Halfway back to the Ambers’ house, Rachel says, “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?”

For the first time in ages, Chloe doesn’t even have to think about it. “No. I just- I wanna be alone for a little while.”

Rachel’s voice is so heavy. “No, you don’t.”

“That was my nice way of saying no, Rachel.”

When she glances over, Rachel just shrugs. “Okay.”

There isn’t any touching when Chloe drops her off. Chloe does look at her, though, gives her a little salute. “Have fun sleeping on it.”

“Thanks,” Rachel says, dryly, and waves. Chloe almost smiles at her, and drives away.

\---

She peels off all of her wet clothes, down to her underwear, and leaves them on the chair next to her bed. Just before she climbs in, the same echoing reverb as before comes creeping in.

_When do you think David will be back_? 

Max’s voice, softer than a mouse, and nervous. Chloe freezes, hears her own voice, more bold, clearer, respond with, “ _Dunno. Don’t worry about it. Strip, Caulfield, I don’t want your chlorine reek in my sheets_.”

A ghostly snort. _Like you’re any better. Can I borrow some PJs_?

And that’s it, barely a swatch of a nonexistent memory. Chloe’s stomach feels like it’s flipped over, but even when she closes her eyes she can’t picture Max, the way she was or the way Chloe almost remembered her, smiling. It’s all gone.

Still, when she climbs into bed, she can almost smell faint chemicals. It takes her a while to fall asleep again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been so long! I'm so sorry to leave you hanging. School has wrapped up and I'm very excited to get back to this story.


	10. Chapter Ten

Her bedroom window is still rolling with rain when she wakes up, but it’s less gray now than it had been the night before. She still has a headache, but that’s just become rote by now.

“ _Maybe we should get up_.”

Max’s voice again. Chloe cricks her neck turning her head to see if she’s there, then when there’s nothing, just scowls. “Stop,” she mumbles, and rolls out of bed.

After that, there’s nothing else. Barely any physical ache to cling onto, even.

She doesn’t want to miss being in pain. She pulls on her clothes, remembers they’re soaking wet and filthy once they’re already on her body, then makes herself change again.

Her skin is still a little sticky underneath, but no one but her (and Max, and Max who is still watching, Max who’s always been watching) will know. She sprays half a can of Axe on herself, checks herself in the mirror for blood, and heads out.

\---

Rachel: meet me @ 2 whales xoxox

But for once Rachel’s thought something out even less than Chloe has, because the minute Chloe pulls into the Two Whales, at least four faces pop up into the nearest window, all of them staring down at her. She just groans, and flops back against the seat. “Shit.”

She nearly puts the car in reverse, nearly nopes the fuck out of there, but before she can, the diner door is banging open and she’s surrounded on all sides. These fucking goddess girls are faster on their feet than she gave them credit for. 

Soon it’s all of them, sans Kate, who’s still frowning at her through the window. Chloe hopes it’s out of respect to Chloe’s sanity, rather than fear of her. The car’s surrounded on all angles, and it kind of feels like a no-win scenario but she’ll be damned if she rolls her window down. Not winning is one thing, but giving up is another. 

“Chloe!” Dana says, her breath fogging up the passenger side window. “Chloe, hi- damn, you look awful.”

Juliet elbows her in the side. “Don’t say that to her, moron, she’s sanctified.”

“Nice four dollar word there, Jules, but she’s still-”

Brooke’s slightly nasal voice cuts across both of them easily. “Chloe! Just checking facts, but did the goddess say if the world was gonna end?”

“Keep your pants on, Brooke,” Chloe snaps, before really thinking better of it. Lightning cracks, in the far distance, and she nearly jumps out of her seat before looking around at all the unmoved girls and realizing it was just in her head.

_Max_ , she thinks, _this is getting real fucking old real fucking fast_. Then she remembers Max can’t read her thoughts.

“Then what does the storm mean?” Alyssa says. Her voice is even harder to understand muffled through the glass. “Did she say?”

_Sort of_ isn’t a great answer. Neither is _fuck off_ , but it’s more natural on her tongue. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, and puts her keys back in ignition. “That’s her problem.”

“ _Her_ problem-” Stella starts, scandalized, but Dana’s finally fought off Juliet, and interrupts her. “But Chloe, hey- what’s going to happen to you now?”

It’s very like Rachel to appear at that exact moment, sparring Chloe the answer. “Hey!” she says, suddenly present and bright at the center of the mob. “Let me through, y’all, Jesus- Chloe, change of plans. I already picked up some coffee, let’s roll.”

There’s a chorus of indignation, and Rachel just rolls her eyes, elbows her way into the passenger seat, and sits down with finality. Chloe eyes her, a very small knot in the pit of her gut. “Yeah? Where to?”

“Where else?” Rachel says, reaching into the glove compartment and pulling out a cigarette. “Our place.”

The junkyard. Chloe’s stomach turns a little. “I haven’t been in a while.”

Rachel side-eyes her, then looks away to flick her lighter open. “What, you’ve forgotten the way?”

“No,” Chloe says, and leaves it at that. She makes an impatient gesture for the rest of the girls to back away, then turns the car back on. “Let’s go.”

Some of the girls call after her when they leave, but neither of them look back. Rachel waits until they’re well out of earshot, rolls down the window, and blows out smoke.

\---

Once she’s actually parked somewhere in American Rust, she really looks over at Rachel for the first time. Rachel doesn’t look back at her; she’s busy rubbing out the nub of her cigarette on the door handle. “Jesus, Rachel. Don’t you look like shit.”

And she really does. She looks like shit for a _normal_ person. Her hair is almost matted, messy, and there are dark circles under her eyes that look like she didn’t even bother to cover up. Her lips are chapped, and when she glares at Chloe her eyes are a tiny bit bloodshot. “You’re one to talk.”

“Of course I am,” Chloe snaps, then winces because she’s sick of being mad. She doesn’t have the energy anymore. She takes the coffee Rachel bought her, and sniffs it. “Is there-”

Wordlessly, Rachel passes her a flask, and Chloe doesn’t even bothering checking it before dumping the entire contents into the cup. It turns out to be tequila, which is kind of gross, but at least it’s something. 

After taking two burning gulps, she turns to Rachel, head lolling. “So? What’s the big plan, then?”

Rachel’s frowning down at her own cup. “I was up all night,” she says, “and, like, going through my journal, and everyone else’s journals, and trying to think of a way to fix this for you. I was. And I just… I don’t know where to start. I don’t know anything about her.”

“Helpful,” Chloe says, and fishes in a pocket for her own cigarette. “Real helpful, Rach, thanks.”

That just gets her a scowl, but it wanes off the longer Rachel looks at her, and turns pitying. Chloe can’t bear to look back at it, just blows into her already lukewarm coffee.

They just stay there for a moment. Chloe gives the junkyard a cursory look through the window, but there’s nothing. No girls. No deer. No sound. 

“I think,” Rachel says at last, quietly, “I think- you need to tell me what happened. I know you don’t want to, but you’re the only person who’s ever spoken to her. You’re her beloved, Chloe. If there’s a way out of this, she gave it to you.”

But she didn’t. Chloe knows that.

It takes her two tries to light her cigarette. “I can’t explain it to you. I mean- okay, listen. It’s not that I won’t, or I don’t want to. I mean, I don’t want to. But I’m not trying to be difficult, it’s just almost impossible to tell you everything she told me. It was so much. Barely any of it made sense.”

At least she knows Rachel will understand that. She’s a priestess, for fuck’s sake. Rachel nods, slow, then takes a second cigarette out of Chloe’s glove compartment. 

“Okay,” she says. “How about this. I’m gonna ask you questions about her. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, or if you can’t. But if you think you can, tell me. All right?”

It doesn’t sounds great, but at this point they don’t have a lot of alternatives. Chloe takes another big gulp of her coffee. “Yeah, okay. Shoot.”

Rachel gives her a hard look, and Chloe lights her cigarette for her. When Rachel draws back, she’s still giving Chloe that look. “Chloe. You’re not gonna let me hurt you, right?”

And she’s gonna laugh it off, she totally intends to, but she can’t laugh. That time’s gone. “Not anymore,” she says, and takes her own drag. 

\---

It takes maybe an hour and a half, and Chloe refuses about half the questions. It’s a start.

“Okay,” Rachel says, scribbling some more in her journal. “Okay, so-”

“Can I ask you something?” Chloe says suddenly. It’s just occurred to her, the memory of Max on her tiptoes, Rachel’s face like rapture. “What did she say to you?”

Rachel pauses, then taps the back side of her pen against the paper, twice. “If she wanted you to know, she wouldn’t have whispered it.”

Chloe’s mouth hangs open in unfiltered shock for a minute before she snaps it closed. “Well, holy fuck, Rachel, if Max wanted you to know everything I just told you, she would’ve just told you in the first place, huh? But I told you anyway, asshole!”

She’s hit a nerve there, and she meant to. Rachel winces, and tucks her hair back with both hands. “Okay,” she mumbles. “She just said- she just said ‘take care of each other’.” Before Chloe can finish digesting that, she looks up again, hurriedly. “Did she- did she say much about me? Like, other than the-the death thing.”

Both coffees are gone, and the cigarette’s burned out, and Chloe desperately needs something to do with her hands. “No- no, not really. She didn’t know you, there wasn’t much to say.” She almost says _she thought you could make me happy but she was wrong_ , but she doesn’t because Rachel’s just trying to help, she doesn’t deserve that.

“Oh,” Rachel says, and looks away. Her bottom lip gets pulled in between her teeth, viciously, the red of it turning white under bone. “Okay. Um.”

Chloe lets her sit on that for a moment, then leans farther back in her seat, jams her hands in her pockets. “Yeah. So? What’s the verdict?”

That snaps Rachel out of it. It’s as though she’s just suddenly remembering Chloe is there. “Right. Yeah.” She flips back through her notes, frowning. “Okay, so I think- I think I have a general idea. It’s kinda vague, and probably dangerous.”

“Love it,” Chloe says dryly, and closes her eyes. “Go for it.”

“Okay,” Rachel says again. “So basically, it seems Max’s presence got stronger when you interacted with her or remembered more things about her, right? Like she got more significant in the timestream the more visible she became to people. Or you specifically, I guess.”

Chloe keeps her eyes closed. “Sure.”

“So- so I think the trick is to have you remember more,” Rachel says, her voice a little shaky. “You said you’ve been getting, like, flashes, and visions, remembering how it was when she was here as a real person. I think, like, the more you do that, the easier it’ll be to bring her back. Or figure out a way to bring her back, anyway.”

Or Chloe’s head will explode. Either way, it works for her. “Sure, why not. Let’s give it a shot.”

She sits up, brushes off her jeans for no real reason, and glances over at Rachel, who’s already staring at her. “What?”

Rachel startles, then shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says. “I just kinda wish… it’s stupid. I wish that you would be a bitch about this, is all. I wish we could go back to how things were.”

She’s sure Rachel does. But now Chloe can’t think of a moment in her life that she particularly wants to go back to; none of it’s very rose-colored at the moment. “I’m tired, Rachel,” she says, for lack of better things to say. “No matter what I do, everything- everything hurts. I just want this to be over. I want it to end.”

There’s a moment where Rachel reaches for her, as if to pet her hair, the movement as natural as anything, and Chloe moves her head away. Rachel’s hand just hangs there in the air, too long, before it drops back into her lap. “I know. I know.”

“Mm,” Chloe says, not really willing to say that Rachel doesn’t know, she can’t. She thinks it anyway. “So what’s the MO then?”

Biting her lip again, Rachel flips back a few pages. “Okay, so there are some places you feel like you’ve been with her, in the other life, and somewhere you’ve definitely been with her, in this one. I think what we need to do is inspect both, right? Because they’re significant to both of you. And, um, here is one of them, right? You saw her here?”

Chloe cringes. “Yeah, man, because you fucking died here.”

“So we’ll avoid that spot,” Rachel says steadily. “Come on, dude. I’m not scared. You shouldn’t be either. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you, all right? I promised her.”

Logically, Chloe does know that Rachel can’t really do shit to hold back the pain. But for once, the sentiment really is nice. 

“Okay,” she says. “Fine. Listen, I’ve already kinda scoped this area a couple of times, and it’s really no good feelings about, okay? So I wanna go a little further. Let’s, um-”

Rachel nods, gets out, and comes to the other side to open Chloe’s door. “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s go to the train tracks, okay?

It’s easy to remember, suddenly, what it was about Rachel that made Chloe love her in the first place. It’s not as easy as loving her like that again, but she figures it’s a step in the right direction.

\---

Chloe balances on the edge of the rails to walk along it, the way she’s always done. Rachel just walks straight on the tracks. 

“Can’t believe I was fuckin’ dead,” Rachel says suddenly, as if this is a conversation Chloe wants to have. “And Jefferson too, that fucker. Can’t believe you’re the mortal beloved.”

“Really?” Chloe says bitterly, tilting and quickly catching her balance- (soft feeling, “ _don’t fall_!”) - “Because I totally knew. I saw it coming the whole time.”

Rachel shakes her head, frustrated. “No, but I should’ve known it was you,” she says. “All the signs were there, you were in so much pain and I was just- being so obtuse. Ignoring you. I’m so sorry, Chloe.”

Chloe wrinkles her face, waves an impatient hand. It’s as close to forgiveness as she can get for now.

So Rachel goes on. “I guess- and this is no excuse. I guess I just really wanted it to be me.”

She can’t help herself; Chloe snorts. “Not feeling special enough?”

The fun goes out of it when Rachel levels her with a look that’s genuinely hurt. “Don’t be mean about it, Chloe.”

Hurriedly, Chloe looks away. “Sorry. It’s just- it’s not enjoyable. For me. I don’t think you really want this.”

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” Rachel says, and her tone is irritable but her voice has softened. “I mean, I know it hurts you. I wish it didn’t. But- you’re the impetus of a cosmic love story, Chloe. You’re a _divine entity_.” Chloe wrinkles her nose, but Rachel doesn’t notice. “And like… she didn’t even know me. I’ve spent all this time figuring her out, and she didn’t know me. She probably doesn’t even give a shit about me, she just saved me for _you_.”

It’s not like Rachel to talk this way, to let herself expose a weak spot so frankly, and Chloe feels a knee-jerk instinct to cover it up for her. “Nah, man, come on. You’re not that different. She had a great eye for images and for- for art-”

“ _I have no doubt we’ll meet soon_.”

She freezes in place, and immediately surveys the area. Rachel’s already stopped, and is watching her. 

“I heard-” Chloe says, then stops, and waits. But there’s no other sound. “We must have been- together, here. Right here.”

“On the tracks,” Rachel breathes.

“Yeah,” Chloe says absently. “I remember- I can’t hear her now, but I can- I remember I knew she was special, then. We were right here, right here, and she was talking to me and I wasn’t angry anymore.”

Rachel’s just looking at her, an impossibly soft expression of an emotion Chloe can’t identify on her face. “You were in love with her here.”

“No, no,” Chloe says, shaking her head, and that feels wrong, denying it, but Rachel saying it was true felt wrong too. “Not yet. It was just that… I don’t know. She was here. That’s all I can really make out.”

The air’s so open here, so much so that the smell of the ocean feels natural, instead of out of place. Rachel frowns a little. “Okay, good. Is there anything-”

“Yes,” Chloe cuts across her impatiently, bringing one hand up to grind it against her temple. “Yes, there’s something else, I can feel it but I can’t see it- this is important, Rachel-”

Suddenly, there’s a loud, sharp sound, so violent Chloe’s almost sure it couldn’t have come from anywhere but her own head, and-

_Screaming whistles, the earth shaking under her-_

_“Max, help me-!”_

_The same death, over and over, different places and different methods and different times, but it’s always the same, she only has one week to live-_

_“Damn, that was so close-”_

“She saved me again,” Chloe pants, and suddenly snaps back, back into the reality where the hand on her back belongs to Rachel. Rachel, who’s looking down at her with wide, concerned eyes as Chloe leans forward, hands on her knees, catching her breath. “She was telling the truth, it wasn’t just the bathroom, I died here too- it was the same death, it wouldn’t let me go, _she_ wouldn’t let me go-”

“You’re bleeding,” Rachel says sharply, and tilts Chloe’s chin up, reaches into her pocket and pulls out a mini pack of tissues. Chloe waves her off and stands up straight again, and wipes the blood off herself with bare hands.

Still, when she opens her mouth, she nearly chokes on the salt of it. “I told her we’d always be together,” she says, and chokes on that instead.

The train whistles again. They got off the tracks, Chloe tripping dazedly on the wood. When they’re on solid ground again, Rachel’s still offering her a tissue. Her gaze is impossible, but Chloe meets it anyway.

“We can get her out,” Rachel says. “I know it. And then you will be together.”

“I don’t know how not to be an angry person,” Chloe says. “I don’t know how to be the person she loved.”

“Chloe,” Rachel says. “You _are_ the person she loves.”

And she presses the tissue into Chloe’s hand, and Chloe mops up her blood, and they walk around the train tracks on the way back to the truck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting there, guys! Thanks to Bri and Amy for beta'ing.
> 
> It's my pre-birthday! Likely will be my birthday when most of you are reading this. Have a good one!


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one went unbeta'd, not for any reason other than I felt like it didn't need it. If there are any errors, please forgive me!

After that, it’s like a scavenger hunt, but to the death.

Like usual Rachel asks more questions, and like usual Chloe can only answer the simplest ones. Her critical thinking skills have really been shot as of late, but she’s still good at visualizing, at call and response. Those have always been her strengths.

“We never left this town,” is the first thing Rachel wants to know that Chloe’s able to answer. “This was the only place we could be together. I know that.” It takes another second of contemplation before she adds, “She could leave. I never could. I’m trapped here.”

They’re taking notes now. At least, Rachel is. Chloe just keeps talking, and talking. It’s the best she can do. Rachel pauses her scribbling, and looks up at her. “That’s why we couldn’t leave town that night.”

Chloe shrugs. “I guess. But she told me that- in the future, I’m able to leave. So I don’t know.”

“In December,” Rachel says, slowly. “When I said we could leave. That’s when. It wasn’t the right time.”

The car hood is hot, sticky metal under their butts, and Chloe leans back on it, spreads her arms like Jesus, and takes the full force of the sun. Her shoulders are already heavy and flaky with burns. “Time is fucked.”

Rachel chuckles. “Word. Okay, then, we’re gonna investigate places around town only, see what we can figure out from there. The big ones are, um, the school, obviously, the junkyard, the beach and the lighthouse-”

“My house,” Chloe says, and picks some shedding skin off her forearm. 

“Your-” Rachel stops, glances at her, then goes back to her journal. “Your house, yeah, okay. We should go one by one through them, I think. Being careful, though, I don’t want you to Old Faithful out the nose on me again.”

Given the way Chloe’s last few Max Encounters have gone, there seems to be no way around that. Still, she shrugs, turns her head to expose one cheek to the sun and press the other to the burning metal of the car. “Taking it slow. Got it.”

There’s the sound of flipping pages, and a soft exhale. “Not too slow,” Rachel says. “We have an appointment. Someone’s super eager to give us a hand.”

\---  
“And over here we have the gym, it’s not so much a spiritual hotspot as, um, the roof, or the pool, but you know, still worth noting. The pool is en route there, though, and stop me if I’ve already said this, but-”

Whatever-his-name-is has an annoying kind of voice, high-pitched and lingering on words, and Chloe’s trying to tune him out, focusing on the thrumming pulse of pain in her head that means she’s close to something. Walking through school grounds has a nostalgic feeling the same way the taste of birthday cake does, ever since she threw it up in brown-blue chunks at age nine. She never stopped eating it, though. So she can’t stop walking now.

Rachel’s walking behind her, half-listening to what’s-his-name and half focused on her journal, occasionally elbowing Chloe to make sure she’s paying attention. She means well but it’s not that helpful, because it keeps breaking Chloe’s concentration on the ache in her head, the same soft feeling of a hand touching hers.

“-and, like, the Vortex Club used to throw a lot of parties here, too- well, I bet you know that, Rachel- at least until Nathan got canned for-

“- _welcome to the end of the world, ladies_!”

Chloe comes to a halt so sharply her boots squeak. Rachel looks back at her, startled, but the boy- “ _Warren!”, Warren_ \- just keeps prattling on. Chloe raises a hand to her nose, and holds the other up, a stop signal.

“Shut up,” she says, hard, and Warren jumps and turns around, meeting her eyes for the first time. “Say that again.”

He blinks at her for a second, then Rachel gives him a slightly impatient nod, which seems to jilt him into saying, “What? About the parties? Yeah, um, kind of grossly capitalistic, you know, but they were good if you wanted to drink-”

Max’s voice, sudden, low and concerned. “... _have you been drinking_?”

Pain spikes through Chloe’s head, and she curses, pressing both hands to her face and closing her eyes. “Shit! Shit.”

“What is it?” Rachel’s voice says urgently, and when Warren goes, “Uh, is she bleeding-” she cuts him off. “Shut up- Chloe, what is it?”

“Him,” Chloe says, gesturing with one hand through still closed eyes, guessing at where Warren is. “Him, he was there, she and I were here together and he was there- a party- shit, fuck! Shit.”

There’s the echo of emotion thrumming alongside the pain now, small and base and ugly, a feeling Chloe isn’t entirely sure she’s felt before. “Rachel-”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Rachel says, and her voice is close and tense. “What do you feel.”

“Fuck,” Chloe mumbles. “Hang on.”

Her own voice, angry. “... _no time for this shit. Come on, Max_.” A feeling like sickness in her stomach. Her hands cold. 

Max’s face, red.

“She was crying,” Chloe says suddenly. It’s the most visceral, definable thing.

“Who was crying?” Warren’s voice says, accompanied by Rachel saying, “shut up,” again. Chloe just shakes her head.

“We don’t have to stay,” Rachel says, but Chloe shakes her head again, eyes scrunched shut hard. “Talk to me, okay? Talk through it.”

Her teeth are clenched too. Everything is clenched. It hurts to force words out. “We were here together. She was scared. I was angry. I was here… god. We were here to kill someone, I think.”

Ignoring Warren’s shrill “ _kill_ someone?” Rachel’s breath just goes sharper. “Who?” 

“Nathan, I think,” Chloe mutters. “He was- he’d done something to me. No, shit, Jefferson. He’d done something to you. Both of them, maybe. It’s all fucked up, I can’t tell, I was angry but then she was crying and I feel-felt- I feel so fucking sick-”

(“ _He drugged and kidnapped_ -”)

Her knees give out, and she would have fallen flat on her face if Rachel hadn’t caught her under her armpits just in time. “Chloe! Stop, you’ve got to stop, Jesus, you look like a Grateful Dead poster-”

“He hurt her,” Chloe breathes. “He kidnapped her too. Like he did you. Both of you- shit! Shit, he hurt her too.”

Rachel goes all still. Her hands clench on Chloe’s elbows. “What?”

“Drugged and kidnapped,” Chloe mumbles. There’s blood on her nose and it itches but she can’t unfist her hand from her hair to wipe it away. “That’s what she said. She was drugged and kidnapped. That’s what he did to you too. And he killed you. And I didn’t- help. Either of you.”

Her voice goes high and keening at the end, embarrassingly animal-like, and the shock of it is enough to have her shooting back up onto her feet, pinch her nose and draw the blood out. Rachel stands up with her, slower. 

“But that didn’t happen,” Rachel said. “Chloe, it’s not your fault, and it didn’t happen. I’m not dead.”

“Yeah,” Chloe says, “yeah, and she’s _gone_ because you’re not dead and I’m not dead. She doesn’t exist any more because I didn’t help her.”

Rachel doesn’t say anything to that, because she can’t. It’s just true.

Still a few cautious feet away, Warren finally tears his gaze from the blood dripping from Chloe’s chin, and scratches his head. “Uh, so. You guys still want to go to the pool, or?”

\---

Chloe walks into the pool and immediately blacks out.

“- _wish Rachel were here_.”

“... _as long as you’re with me_...”

“... _you’re becoming a force of nature_.”

“- _don’t_ feel _like a hero_.”

“... _so sad. I’m never leaving you_.”

“ _Chloe_? Chloe!”

This time, when her head hurts, most of the pain is hollow, in the back. Rachel’s hair is tickling her face, and when Chloe’s eyes focus on her, her nose is scrunched up and only a few inches away. “Chloe, Jesus Christ!”

Warren is hovering and softly swearing in the background, pale head bobbing, but Chloe can’t focus on him. It’s taking up enough effort to focus on Rachel. “She was here.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Rachel says, through her teeth, and hauls Chloe into a sitting position. “We shouldn’t have come here, I didn’t know it would be this bad. You hit your head.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Chloe says absently, just as Warren exclaims “You’re bleeding again!”, and she glares at him so hard he visibly gulps and retreats back three whole steps. She props up onto her arms, and frowns at the artificial-blue water, lit from beneath, as Rachel crawls behind her on her knees to check out the back of her head. “We weren’t supposed to be here.”

“Yeah,” Warren says, “well, really only the swim team uses it now-”

Chloe shakes her head, and Rachel grunts at her, fingertips against her skull. “No. Me and her. We were doing something illegal.”

Rachel snorts, but she isn’t actually amused. “What, more murder?”

“Ha ha,” Chloe says, equally dry. “I don’t know. I just remember I brought her here… it was me who brought her here. Because she was scared, and sad about something, and I wanted to-”

A sudden flash of Max, just over Rachel’s shoulder, so vivid Chloe nearly faints again. Max, just a girl and nothing else, pealing out in a nervous giggle and peeling out of her shirt. It’s not for show, but for function, and Chloe’s mouth is dry and her stomach is empty and-

She’s gone. She was never there.

“This is where the love was,” Chloe says, in a whisper, because it’s none of Warren’s fucking business. “Here. It was right here.”

The fingertips coming away from her head. The water in the pool is lapping against itself, unbreaking, and everything is so quiet.

Rachel’s face isn’t visible, but it’s easy to imagine. “Okay. I think we need to check out your head. Do you want to stay here longer? 

In fact, the outside of her head is throbbing. Chloe’s not going to protest that one. With one hand on her elbow, she stands up. “No. I don’t need to stay. I’ll remember.”

Today is September 30th.

\---

Kate takes them up to the roof. That’s her place.

Chloe can’t feel a damn thing up there.

“I don’t know,” Kate says. “I always feel her best up here. It’s not, like, great. I don’t remember things the way you do, but I still get… emotional echoes, I think I should say.” Her eyes lose focus, just a little, as she stands on the ledge.

“Fear,” Rachel supplies for her, helpfully. “And love. Her love, right?”

Kate keeps gazing into the distance. “Yeah.”

“Get off of there,” Chloe says. 

For a moment, Kate looks back, the loose wisps of her bun fluttering, and Chloe almost gets a flash of something, like a half of a half of a memory, not like a video or a photo like they usually seem like but a sentence, a newspaper headline. Then it’s gone, and Kate gets off the ledge.

“I don’t know why I even came up here in the first place,” Kate says. “I’m afraid of heights.”

Chloe’s not. She goes and stands on the ledge in Kate’s place. Rachel isn’t afraid of anything, and she doesn’t have anything to prove either. She stays exactly where she is. “I’m not getting anything here. I don’t think she and I were ever here together.”

Kate doesn’t seem all that bothered by that. Mostly she seems distracted. “Really? Huh. I’ve alway felt her super strongly here. And, actually. Usually when I come up and look, you can see a deer in the woods, right over- there.”

She points, a considerable distance into the forest. Rachel scribbles down the location in her journal. Chloe squints. It’s all darkness.

“There’s nothing there now,” Kate says, a little belatedly. “There hasn’t been since she took you to the lighthouse. I think she’s gone.”

A bird shoots past Chloe’s head, crowing loudly, nearly beans Rachel right in the head on the flyby and then drops on the other side of the roof, vanishing out of sight. Chloe squints further into the black of the woods. 

“No,” she says. “She’s not.”

Today is October 1st. 

\---

Her house is so full of echoes it feels like living in a drum.

There’s wine on the carpet that isn’t really there. There’s dents in her bedroom wall that aren’t really there. When she’s walking around her room, the kitchen, her living room, the backyard where the swingset’s gone rusted, even when she’s not listening for it, Max’s voice is still there, whispering snatches of sentences containing “ _forever” “happy” “future” “sorry sorry sorry_.”

It’s all memory. The real Max is barely here anymore.

And when she lies in bed, there’s nothing now. No dreams, no memory, no feelings, no blood. It feels horribly empty in a way that quiet and the absence of pain shouldn’t feel.

So she keeps pacing around. All the time. She doesn’t sit still, and she doesn’t sleep. She walks in circles around her bed. She follows the path the pain lies out in front of her.

Max, legs bare in the sunlight, light red and blue. Her nose closes up like a cold. _Warm_.

She round the bed, takes two paces to stand in front of her closet, closes her eyes. Her head starts pounding. _Warmer_.

“Stop second guessing,” she whispers, but whether it’s to herself or to Max, time has muddled it up so much she can’t tell.

In the mind, the rest of the sentence fills out, so loudly it’s like she’s hearing it in her ears, feeling the words in her own mouth. … " _for example, I dare you to kiss me_."

There’s a momentary soft feeling before a more sudden and sharper one, like a hammer hitting her in the head. She yelps, and opens her eyes, only to find an empty space in front of her and blood dripping down her chin.

Her brain feels like it’s about to split in two. She has to be getting close.

Now she moves to her desk, and after a second of hesitation, sits down in it- cups a hand over her nose to stop blood from staining the wood, and closes her eyes again.

“Max?” she whispers, into the heat of her palm. “Did you really?”

Her own voice echoes in her ears, like a response, bringing her to lean back against the chair. " _You get one kiss and suddenly you’re all over me_?"

Chloe had wanted Max to kiss her. And Max had, she must have. She knows that now, not so much by remembering as by holding it hard in her mind, clasping it inside herself.

Then, without meaning to, without even focusing, Chloe hears another voice, familiar and faraway, one that isn’t her own. " _I’m just- I’m just so glad you’re here_."

Her eyes fly open just as a bird hits the window in front of her at full velocity, leaving in its wake a loud bang, a crack, and a dark red smear against the glass.

She screams, and hears Joyce curse below and come barreling up the stairs. “Chloe! Chloe, are you all right?”

Chest heaving, Chloe isn’t able to manage anything affirmatory before the door bangs open, and she jumps again, making an embarrassing squeak. Joyce stands in the doorway, holding a towel with hands still wet from the sink and looking aghast. “Chloe, what in the fresh hell-”

“A bird-” Chloe says, gesturing confusedly to the window, “a bird hit-” before Joyce takes two long strides to kneel down in front of her and press the towel to her face. Her eyes go wide, but Joyce’s own are huge and horrified when she meets them.

Dabbing at her nose, Joyce says, too loud, “You’re covered in blood! Chloe, what is going on in here!”

“Nosebleed,” Chloe says, and looks back at the window again. The blood is dribbling down the window now.

That had been Max’s voice, her full voice. She’d heard her. 

“-you listening to me, Chloe?”

With some force, she snaps back to attention. Joyce is glaring at her, but there are tears in her eyes. “Honey, I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me!”

“Mom,” Chloe says, shaking her head and doing her best to focus. “Mom, listen, I’m not doing this to myself, okay? It’s just- happening.”

Joyce’s eyes narrow. “Do you think I’m stupid, or do you really expect me to believe-”

“No!” Chloe says coming onto her feet and running a hand through her feel. “I can’t explain this to you, but you have to trust me, okay? There’s some weird shit going on here, I can’t help it, I can’t stop it from being real. I can’t stop now, Mom, I’m so close to figuring it out. I’m so close to getting her back.”

This is a different way for words to spill out of her, panicked and desperate rather than as echoes of a forgotten life. It’s not as effective as remembering. Joyce’s eyes just go narrower. “Chloe, what are you going on about? Does this have to do with all of Rachel’s voodoo crap? I’ve tried not to be judgmental, but-”

“No- well, yes, but- god, I need to talk to Rachel,” Chloe says, and starts heading for the door.

Today is October 4th.

\---

On October 5th, they go through the entire church’s journals. Chloe remembers about the photography. She remembers Seattle, sort of. She remembers Max’s favorite color is blue.

On October 6th, she wakes up dreamless with blood all over her face, and remembers the rewind.

\---

The lighthouse is an evil place. Chloe’s always known that.

“We were here together,” Chloe says, squinting at the sun, biting her lip against the low thrum of pain in her temple. “I’ve seen it a couple of times. She was- right there, and I was here, and the storm was-”

She makes an impatient hand gesture at the sea, and Rachel just nods, scribbling in her little journal before looking up again.

The chilly slap of wind and water. Max’s face, stung red with storm and pain. “She was here, and she was- fuck!”

“Chloe-” Rachel starts, but Chloe ignores her, screws her eyes shut and presses the flat of her palm, hard, into her forehead, grinding it against the skin, focusing on the pain she can control.

“... _I caused this. I caused all of this_!”

“She thought it was because of her,” Chloe breathes. “The storm.”

There’s a short intake of breath behind her. “Why-”

“I don’t know, shut up,” Chloe says, and scrunches her face tighter. “I said… I said it wasn’t her fault. That everything had to happen the way it did, except- except what happened to you.”

The soft sound of a swallow. “Because I was already dead.”

Max. Small and soaking wet and hopeless, her eyes on Chloe’s face and then away, so big and so heavy with fear. The feeling of her shoulders under Chloe’s hands, boney and shaking and fragile. 

Then something else, something even smaller.

“Holy shit,” Chloe breathes. She doesn’t even realize she’s opened her eyes until they start to burn, her wrist still filling her line of vision as her palm presses into her head. “Holy shit, Rachel. I think I asked her to kill me.”

“You _what_?” Rachel gasps, and she comes back around to stand in front of Chloe now, hands balled into tight fists, aghast. “Why would you-”

“I don’t know!” Chloe says, and she can feel the blood dripping down her face when Rachel’s eyes flick down to stare at it but that’s not terribly important right now. “I don’t know, I just- I was holding the butterfly, the blue- I don’t know! But I think I told her- I said it was the only way to fix everything.”

Rachel throws her arms up in the air. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know it doesn’t!” Chloe says, and wipes some of the blood off her mouth before closing her eyes again. “But I’ve seen this shit before, before I even knew- her and me at the lighthouse, the butterfly thing. I’ve seen this before. It’s always been here.”

They’re silent for a minute. Then Rachel looks away, over the side of the cliff. “Lighthouses only exist because of storms.”

“Deep,” Chloe says, and kicks a rock over the edge.

Today is October 7th. 

\---

October 8th is a wasted day. Joyce tries to drag her to the hospital, and it’s hours and hours of screaming and fighting and clawing doorways and finally escaping to Rachel’s empty house with a box full of goddess stuff and the half-empty Kleenex box in her truck.

They try, but Chloe can’t remember a fucking thing for the rest of the day. Max was never in Rachel’s house.

\---

She dreams about Max that night, Max standing in the center of her room, and she dreams about Max being furious.

“Chloe, you have to cut this shit out right now,” is the first thing she says.

At first Chloe doesn’t even realize it’s a dream. She sits up, first on her elbows then all the way, and Max is glaring down at her, arms crossed. She’s wearing one of Rachel’s flannels, which is weird, and her expression is sharp and mad.

It’s Chloe’s bedroom. It’s cleaner than it ought to be.

“You’re not the real Max,” Chloe says. 

Without unfolding her arms or even lessening her glare, Max scoffs. “How would you know? You have no idea who I am. You _forgot_ me.”

“I do know who you are,” Chloe says, and even though this is dreamy and she can only half-control the words she’s saying, at least she knows she means them. “I know Max. She came to the beach and she took me to the lighthouse and she never blamed me for anything. You’re not her. She wasn’t angry.”

And so dream Max changes, suddenly and seamlessly, becomes something vulnerable and smaller and more afraid. It makes her a little more like the real Max, which makes Chloe have to ease up a little, her own subconscious getting masterful at the guilt trip.

Max hugs her elbows to her chest again. “You have Rachel,” she says. “Isn’t that enough?”

She wants to say yes, but the truth is, even with Rachel, Chloe was always still searching, still wanting. “Rachel doesn’t love me.”

“Fine,” Max says, like she already knew that’s exactly what Chloe would say. Then Chloe reminds herself of course she knew, this isn’t Max but a part of Chloe’s own brain. “But someone else could. You could find _someone_ to love you, a real person.”

That part doesn’t sound like it came out of Chloe’s own mind. She must be getting a better idea of Max after all. She says, “But you told me you already do.”

“Fuck, Chloe!” Max says, and now, finally, she seems like the girl Chloe might have known, pink-cheeked with emotion and eyes bright and hands splayed, reaching forward without something to hold onto. “Why do you always want what you can’t have?”

It’s Joyce’s words, it’s David’s words, it’s Rachel’s words. It’s every intrusive thought Chloe’s ever had. It’s not something Max would ever say to her. So it’s not real. “You’re real. You’re right here. Rachel says you can come back, I know you can. It’s not impossible.”

The emotion in Max’s face doesn’t twitch, not even a little. It’s like all of this is rehearsed, final production, open dress. “It’s not possible if you don’t want the world to rip open, Chloe. It’s impossible.”

It clicks.

Finally, finally. It clicks.

“Those things aren’t the same,” Chloe says breathlessly, and she stands up, off her bed.

Max flickers a little, in resolve and in reality. The desperation is gone, quick as a blink, from her face, and for a second it’s blank. Then irritated confusion fills it. “What?”

“Something being impossible and ripping the world open in order to make it happen are two different things,” Chloe says. Her mind is whirring. The room is fading away, it’s just her and Max left. “That means it’s possible. It’s possible to get her back. I just- I just-”

Dream-Max snarls, and it’s a wicked, dangerous sound. It’s enough to startle Chloe out of her sentence, but the thought in her head doesn’t go away. It keeps growing.

“You’re fucking evil,” Max spits. “Evil- I gave up everything so the world wouldn’t fall apart, and you’re going to destroy all that for-for what? A roll in the hay with a infinity-old virgin who only says she loves you because she can’t remember anything else?”

“You betcha,” Chloe says. “Now fuck off. I need to talk to Rachel.”

Max spits at her, but it’s a dream, so. “You don’t get to make this choice,” she hisses. “I’m not worth this.”

Chloe looks at the girl, and for once she’s not so sad, she’s not afraid. There’s a fire in her. “You’re not her,” she says. 

And the world opens up. Sunlight comes pouring in through her window and into her eyes.

Today is October 10th.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second to last chapter! Thanks for sticking with me so far.


	12. Chapter Twelve

Chloe wakes up, and sees Rachel, asleep, next to her. Her hair is fluttering over her open mouth, her arms folded up above her head, and she’s very beautiful. She looks like she always has, like endless youth.

She doesn’t wake up when Chloe gets up, slides back into her shoes, creeps carefully out the door. She sleeps like the dead, she always has. Chloe’s used to it. She’ll wake up when she needs to wake up.

There’s still bloodstains all over Chloe’s truck, small dime-sized drops of rusty brown in the leather, and she’s never gonna be able to get them out so it’s time to stop trying. She fills her tank with gas, buys a new lighter, and goes home. 

She’s at least eight percent sure she knows what she needs to do.

Tomorrow is October 11th.

\---

“Chloe,” Joyce says, her hands shaking where they’re clasped in her lap. “I really think you should be taken to the hospital. You’re not well, honey.”

Well, Jesus. If they were just going to cover things everyone already knew, Chloe’s half of the conversation would’ve been a lot shorter. “Listen, Mom, we don’t have time for that. You need to get out of town with David as soon as possible. Adjust your insurance claims, whatever, I don’t know how it works. But you need to start packing right now.”

Somehow that doesn’t seem to sway Joyce from the hospital idea. Her lips just get thinner. “Chloe Price,” she says, and Chloe groans. “No, you listen to me, young lady. I’ve dealt with a lot of shit from you- no, don’t like at me like that. I have. The boys and the grades and the drugs and the attitude and all of this- but I put up with it. I put up with it because I don’t know how to be a better mother than that. But this is too much. You’re so sick all the time, you’re bloody all the time- I don’t know what you’re on, I don’t know what this cult thing is doing to you- but it needs to stop today. Right now.”

Of course this is when Joyce puts her foot down. “Mom-” Chloe starts, then pauses. “Mom, seriously, this is not the time. I just need you to listen to me for once, okay, I need you to pack up everything valuable and-”

She’s not ready for Joyce to burst into tears.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Joyce sobs, and Chloe freezes up, fists knotting up in the fabric of the couch. “I know- I know this is all my fault, I know I’m a bad mother.”

“No, Mom-”

Joyce hiccups. “No. I am. I am. I know that. I know David hits you, I know you’ve been sad for a very long time and I haven’t done anything about it. But I want to do something about it. I’m _going_ to do something about. Today. Right now.”

Chloe’s mouth is a little dry, and she kind of wants to cry and she kind of wants to hug her mom. But she’s a girl on a mission. “Mom,” she says. “You really wanna do something about it?”

“Yes,” Joyce whines, and blows her nose.

They’re still sitting about seven feet apart. Joyce in the armchair, Chloe on the couch. Neither have moved.

“I need you to pack up as much as you can and get a motel out of town for the next day and a half,” Chloe says. “Bring David if you want, I don’t care. I’ll meet you there on Friday. But don’t come back to town before then.”

Joyce blinks at her, eyes small and red and birdlike, and Chloe swallows, feeling like she’s twelve and she can’t bear to see her mother cry, like she’s nineteen and she still can’t bear it. “Chloe, baby, why?”

“I can’t explain it,” Chloe says. “Look, Mom, I just can’t explain it. It’s a church thing, I don’t understand it either. But I just have a really bad feeling. If- look, if I’m wrong and nothing happens, I’ll pay you back for the motel, I’ll help you move everything back in, I’ll go to the hospital and do whatever you want. But just do it, please just do it, even if nothing happens I’ll know you trust me. This is important to me, Mom.”

There’s a long, long moment of unblinking silence, of Joyce just sitting there with a tissue in her hand, staring at Chloe unreacting. Then she says, “It really means that much to you?” 

“Yes,” Chloe says, exhaling a much bigger breath than she thought she was holding. “Mom, yes. It’s so important.”

For a moment longer, Joyce just looks at her. Then she sniffles, rubs her nose, and looks away. “I… suppose I’ll go get the suitcases, then.”

Chloe gets up, automatic, crosses to her mother, and kisses her on the forehead. “Thank you,” she says, and means it, and Joyce sobs.

But she can’t stop for Joyce. She has to keep going. 

“I need to go to the church now,” she says. “Like, now now. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ll have my phone on me, okay? Take as much as you can out of the house. Everything important. I’ll text you.”

Joyce nods, distracted, and Chloe hugs her shoulders, grabs her keys off the coffee table, and heads out.

She pauses at the door, realizing what she forgot to say. “I love you, Mom. I’m sorry I’ve been such a shitty daughter. I’m sorry for everything.”

And Joyce looks up again, with small freshly-wet eyes, and smiles at her, and Chloe forgives her for all the shitty stuff she did too. “I love you too, sweetheart,” she says. “Promise me you’re gonna come back.”

Chloe’s broken so many promises to her mother. “I promise,” she says. 

And leaves.

\---

Every girl is in the church.

“We need to leave today,” Chloe says. “Everyone in town needs to leave. The storm is going to come.”

No one says _no_ , or _that’s impossible_ , or _who the fuck do you think you are_. Kate just says, calmly, “How do you know?”

“Listen,” Chloe says, roots around behind her and pulls out Victoria’s journal, opens it and puts it down on the floor. All of them- about thirteen girls- are sitting around in the floor between the altars. Even though it’s a circle, Chloe still feels like she’s at the head. “This image- the girl tied up- that’s Max. And this happened on Thursday. The next day was the storm. I’m telling you, it’s coming. I know it is. We need to get everyone out of town.”

Rachel’s staring hard at the drawing. “Fucking Victoria,” she mutters. “She told me she burned this. But she gave it to you.”

The girls are looking at the two of them. Their gazes keep swinging between Chloe and Rachel, as if not sure whether they’re in disagreement, not sure if they should be waiting for confirmation. Impatiently, Chloe wishes for the first time they’d just accept her divine knowledge and _move_ their fucking asses.

Then Rachel stands up. “Okay,” she says. “Then we have to get everyone out of town.”

“Are you kidding me?” Brooke says, still sitting on the floor. “We aren’t a goddamn weather service. No one’s gonna believe us when we say a storm’s coming.”

“Some people will,” Rachel says readily. “I’m willing to bet every single person in town has had a vision of this storm. Some of them are gonna believe it. Some of them just believe in us. Other people we can trick and cajole and carry out. Everyone is _getting out_. This is the whole reason we’re here. But we need to start right now.”

Slowly, reluctantly, the girls start getting to their feet. Then they’re all just standing in a circle. “I’m pretty sure this is impossible,” Alyssa says. “We can’t get every single person in town out.”

The girls all mumble. Chloe knows they’re right.

“Maybe not,” Rachel says, readily. “But it’s not going to be on us if the storm hits them. We’re going to do what we can. That’s all. It won’t be on us.”

Chloe looks away.

She says, “Okay, cool, well. I’m gonna head out then. Gonna start- rounding up people. Good luck, everybody, let’s rendezvous about twenty miles east of here, okay?”

And she tries to leave.

It doesn’t work so well this time.

This time Rachel catches her by the arm. The girls behind them are all scattered, talking to each other, snatching their things up, running out the doors. But Rachel’s just looking at her. “What are you doing?”

So close. Never close enough. “Trying to leave, obviously.”

“No,” Rachel says. “I mean, what are you doing. The storm isn’t coming.”

Chloe looks hard at her. “Yes, it is.”

They stare at each other. Rachel wets her lips. She doesn’t let go of Chloe’s arm. “Okay. Maybe it is. But it wasn’t before today. The storm had signs coming ahead of it, the snow, the whales, the- well. The point is, if the storm is coming now, it means you’ve either done something very stupid or you’re about to do something very stupid.”

It’s total bullshit that she knows this. Chloe hates Rachel Amber. “Yeah, well. Storm’s still coming. We’re wasting time.”

“ _Chloe_ ,” Rachel says, impatiently, and just that.

The thing is, Chloe would fight Rachel. She’ll fight Rachel any day of the week, about any topic, even though she loves her better than almost anything. But not today, and not about this.

“Look,” Chloe whispers, pulling Rachel in closer to her. “I can’t- even now I can’t remember shit, I can’t remember who she was, even, and it’s fucking eating me up inside, okay? All I know is I loved her, like, end-me love, and I don’t even know who she is. I need that back. I just- I need it back.”

Rachel’s eyes are flickering all over her face, worried and uncertain but not confused. Chloe wonders, briefly but not for the first time, if Rachel’s ever been in love. 

Her fingernails loosen from Chloe’s skin, but she doesn’t let go of her forearm. “I love you,” she says fiercely. “And she- Max- she loves you. That’s the whole reason she is the way she is, right? Whatever stupid thing you’re about to do, she wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“You can’t stop me from doing it,” Chloe says.

And Rachel _laughs_ , and that’s why Chloe’s loved her for so long. It’s the only thing that could possibly give her a second thought. And it doesn’t.

“When have I ever been able to stop you from doing anything?” Rachel says, and she lets go of Chloe’s arm. “Just be careful. Please. I don’t want you to die.”

It’s such a simple thing to say. Chloe nods, dumbly, and Rachel stands on her toes and kisses her on the forehead.

“See you twenty miles east of here,” she whispers, and then she’s the one that’s gone.

Chloe stands there, then goes.

\---

Practically no one listens to her when she tells them to evacuate. It’s probably the hair. The point is that she tried. 

\---

The train tracks are cold, and squeak when her boot lands on them. It’s 11:57 pm on Thursday, and she’s pretty sure she didn’t have to wait for midnight. It just felt right.

Max isn’t here.

The air is thick, and humid, and gray. It feels like there _could_ be a storm coming. The junkyard is rattling and empty, and it feels like someone’s put a smoke filter over the whole world.

Chloe lies down on the tracks.

There’s a flash of being here before, painful and sudden, lying here with someone else, someone who must have been Max. There’s an echo of the word _Kerouac_ , of _stop being afraid_.

Blood starts stinging in her nose again. She’s so close now. They’re so close together.

The whistle of the train sounds. It’s from a distance, but not a far one.

Chloe closes her eyes, folds her arms over her chest like she’s in a coffin. “Max,” she whispers, because there’s no point in yelling it, “if you really love me, you’d be here for me now.”

She can hear the chugging of wheels now. The metal of the tracks is vibrating beneath her.

God, she’s so fucking scared.

It’s been like this before, she knows it, suddenly she remembers being here and she was stuck and screaming and someone- _Max_!- shouting _hold on, Chloe_ -

And then the train was there. And now the train is here, twenty yards away and screaming in her ears.

Max had saved her before.

The train is ten yards from her face. She closes her eyes, thinks of how her mom had cooked for her every day of her life and of how her dad used to sweep her over his shoulders when she was small enough and of the way Rachel’s hair shone in the sunset over the beach and of Max, how she had laughed in the diner and held Chloe’s hand at the lighthouse and told her, despite all things, that she loved her.

Even if Max doesn’t come, Chloe might finally be willing to believe she was telling the truth.

The train is six inches away, and death is screeching metal in Chloe’s ears.

Max had saved her before. Not just once.

And here, now, there are arms around her waist, and Chloe is standing up.

She’s standing up. She’s alive. She’s off the tracks and the train is screeching by harmlessly and there’s a girl holding her so tight, a girl with brown hair who has her face buried in Chloe’s collarbone.

It’s like time has stood still. Everything falls away for Chloe then- the sound of the train, the ground solid beneath her feet, the pressure of the wind as it rips past her. She lifts one trembling hand up, lowers it gently on the top of the head buried in her chest.

Max’s hair is soft. Like a real person’s is.

“You’re here,” she says shakily.

When Max looks up, she’s glaring. Her eyes are rimmed with red, and she doesn’t loosen her grip on Chloe, not even slightly. Her chin rests against Chloe’s collarbone, so sharp it hurts. “Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she says, and her voice is quaking too, fearful and furious, “I can’t- _you_ can’t- how could you have-”

“I knew you would come,” Chloe whispers. She brings her other hand up to Max’s neck, cusps her face with more delicacy than she’s ever held anything with. Max’s eyelashes flutter at the touch. “I knew you would come, I knew you would save me.”

Max gapes. “And you- just for that, you were going to-” Then her eyes go wide. “Oh my god! The storm- the storm, this is what you were-”

It might just be Chloe’s imagination, but for a moment it seems like the atoms of Max’s skin space out, thin, go smaller in the pretext of fading away. She holds on tighter. “But you’re here! You’re here now. I fucked it over. It’s coming no matter what you do.”

The skin under her hands goes solid again, and Max just gazes up at her in surprise. Chloe lets out a shaky breath, loosens her white-fingered grip on Max just a little. “There’s no going back. I know that. The storm is going to come now no matter what you do.”

The tiny gasp that comes dragging out of Max’s mouth is the worst sound Chloe’s ever heard. It almost makes her regret it. “If you know- if you really _knew_ that, then how can you possibly-”

“Listen,” Chloe says fiercely, and she presses her hands to both sides of Max’s face, tilts it up so their eyes will unavoidably meet, “listen. I’ve been remembering you. It was hard as fuck, but I wanted to do it for you. And back then when the storm came, you had to choose between me and the town, right? But you didn’t. You chose you. That’s what I’m doing now. I’m choosing you.” 

“Chloe-” Max is crying now, messy like a real person cries. Clumsy, Chloe reaches with her thumbs and smudges away the tears. “Not you, never you, I couldn’t have- and besides, that wasn’t my choice to-

“So it’s mine now,” Chloe says, determined. “It was my choice, and I made it. I picked you. Like you picked me. And it’s like you said, I’d do it again. I’d do it if it meant you could be alive. You can’t be alone forever. Not you. You deserve to have a real life, with real people.”

And it’s almost like Max is spilling into her, into her ribs and mind and heart, the weight of her heavy on Chloe’s chest and the memories of her heavy as they fall into place in Chloe’s head, like they should have been there all along, without her trying so hard. She remembers meeting Max, four years old and shy, playing pirates with Max at seven, spilling secrets with her at thirteen.

The warmth of Max’s hand at fourteen. The warmth of her mouth at nineteen.

Everything falls into place. 

“This is the way it’s supposed to be, right?” she whispers, hoping to God, if there’s one still up there now that Max is down here, that Max knows the answer, hopes it’s the same answer as Chloe’s. “It’s supposed to be you and me. Nothing else matters.”

Trying to catch her breath between sobs, Max manages, “Chloe, I wanted- I wanted to believe that- I _want_ to believe that, but-”

“Aren’t you a goddess?” Chloe says, and she’s crying too but she’s also laughing, just looking at Max’s face, feeling her warm and real and _here_. “Make it the truth.”

And she leans down, before Max can protest anymore, and even though Max’s face is still drawn up with misery she just about falls apart when Chloe kisses her. 

It’s right. It’s right. Chloe’s head tilts down for it and they fit together and the air is full of electricity. It’s right. 

It’s only when Max pulls away and gasps that Chloe realizes the electricity was actually the lightning storm kind of spark, instead of the metaphorical kind. 

“It’s here,” Max says, panicked and miserable, both her hands clutching thin and cold at Chloe’s shoulders. “I can’t- I can’t stop it now. I can’t feel _anything_.” She holds up her right hand, as if to hold on to something, as if to snatch the storm out of the air.

But nothing happens. 

Chloe won’t let go of her. “It’s gone,” she says. “The rewind. The corkstopper in time, or whatever it is you were supposed to be. It’s gone.”

Max nearly falls again, her legs giving out like fawns, and her face is all crumpled when it falls back on her neck, Chloe catching her around the waist. “I’m supposed to _stop it_ ,” she says, her voice raspy. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“No,” Chloe says, and now that she’s done it the doubt will never go away. Now that the wind is picking up and she can’t take it back, she’s going to wonder if this was all selfish, if this was what Max wanted. “No, you’re supposed to be here. With me, right? We’re supposed to be together.”

And Max sobs first, her head falling forward, and Chloe’s holding her up with so much force she feels like they both might topple over. Then she nods, but Chloe isn’t sure what it means. 

“U-um,” she says, because now all the embarrassing romantic stuff is out of the way she has no idea what to say. “So, uh, my tank’s full of gas, but I’m not sure-”

Now Max shakes her head, without looking up. “We’d never make it,” she says. “The storm is coming right now. It’s already here.” Now she looks up. Her eyes are redrimmed, and it’s ugly. She’s so human. “We need to go to the lighthouse. We’ll be safe there.”

The same thing she’d said before. Chloe remembers it all. She _remembers_ this. “So let’s go.”

And they go.

\---

Max shivers in the car, and she shivers when she’s not in it. Her eyes keep focusing in and out, like she’s on a really bad trip. Chloe doesn’t know if she can’t talk or if she doesn’t want to, so she doesn’t push it. She drives them as far up the lighthouse path as she can, stops the car, and helps Max out. She holds Max’s hand the whole way up the hill, but she doesn’t need to carry her. 

The storm comes. 

It rips the town into a million pieces. It’s not even jarring; Chloe’s seen it before. Now it’s just a climax, the end of a movie, dessert after dinner, sex after romance. It fits the mood. She just kind of watches. It’s sort of beautiful, even if it’s fucked up.

Max isn’t crying. She’s just watching too. 

“I don’t know what I’m going to be without it,” she says. She’s still holding Chloe’s hand. Her voice is so flat.

Chloe squeezes her hand. “I’ll tell you, okay? You’ll be a real person.”

Arcadia Bay’s already half gone. Even the ground is ripping up and disappearing into the sea. Max takes a deep breath. “I don’t know how to be a real person,” she whispers. “I haven’t been a real person in… I’ve never been a real person.”

The real person is all Chloe knows. Of course Max can be one. “You’re real to me,” she says. “And- and you’re real to Rachel, and you’re gonna be real to Joyce and, and Kate and the rest of the goddess girls-”

“But I’m not the goddess anymore,” Max says hollowly. 

The rain is slapping them really hard in the face. Chloe looks away from the town, at Max, who is so small even without the world on her shoulders, just watching the ocean eat the town alive. She takes her by the shoulders and turns her around. “It doesn’t matter, Max, okay? They’re gonna remember you. Like the _person_ you. Like I did, okay? Your parents, and my parents, and your friends, and everyone. And- and we’re gonna have a real life together, okay?”

That finally seems to break whatever spell the storm had over Max. She blinks once, twice, then repeats, “A real life together.”

“Yeah,” Chloe says breathlessly. Max is like a drowned rat, like she is in dreams, and cold like she is in dreams, but solid and beautiful and soft under the hand. It’s different than it was. It’s messy and wet and real. “Yeah. We can go to Seattle, okay? And you can be with your parents, and you can go to college in the city, and we can live together there, okay, and you can be a photographer and I can fix cars or something but we’ll be together. It’ll be good, right?”

A flicker of a smile on Max’s mouth. Or maybe it’s just the hair whipping around her face. The rain’s getting in Chloe’s eyes and it’s getting kind of hard to see. “I can’t see the future anymore, Chloe.”

“Cool!” Chloe says, and laughs, and cries, and shakes Max’s shoulders a little. “I can’t either! But here’s what I know, okay? You’re here, and I’m here, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And now we can go be _normal_ together. We saved everyone! We did the best that we could do. I was _better_ for you.”

And Max _laughs_.

She laughs, and shakes her head, and dissolves into sobs, and she’s smiling and crying and hysterical and Chloe feels _really happy_ for the first time, a tornado right behind her and Max crying in front. She grabs her, and kisses her again, because she can. Max kisses her back, still giggling frantically.

“A hundred and sixteen people were still here, Chloe,” she breathes, without breaking the kiss. “They’re getting hit by the storm right now.”

And, okay, that’s kind of their fault. But the fact is, if it were the town or Max, if they couldn’t have gotten a chance to get anyone out at all, it still wouldn’t have been a choice. Not compared to the idea of Max, just Max, giggling at the idea of having a future. 

“We told them to go, Max,” Chloe says. “We did. We knew and we tried to save everyone and they didn’t listen. That’s on them. And,” and she swallows. “Sometimes people just die.”

Max’s laughter cuts off, but the fondness stays. She keeps holding on to Chloe. She reaches a hand up to touch her face. “I think-” she says, and huffs, and chokes a little on rainwater, and it’s so awful and funny and Chloe kisses her again, Max still coughing. “I think I’m not very good at- letting things just happen.”

She’s not. She never has been. Max has always been a savior, a world destroyer, a stone in the road. But now she’s just a person. 

There are worse things to be.

“Hey, me too,” Chloe says. “Me too, right? We both suck at that. But from now on we’re gonna be two stubborn assholes together. Even if you’re like five-three and a buck ten, no one’s gonna mess with us. We saved all their bacon. You were a goddess. And my mom’s finally _listening_ to me. Miracles do happen!”

She blinks, then Max tips her head back and laughs. “Miracles do happen,” she says, goes up on her tiptoes, winds her arms around Chloe’s neck, and kisses her again. 

It takes about five hours for the storm to go away. They wait it out inside the lighthouse, which shatters around them but never on top of them. When the wind dies down, when they finally get out of the tower, the whole town is gone like it’s never been there. Eaten alive.

It’s clean. It’s like art.

And they go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a journey!
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who stuck with the story this long. It was a very important piece of work to me and I hugely appreciate everyone who took the time to read, comment, and leave kudos. I hope everyone has liked reading it half as much as I liked writing it.
> 
> This will probably be my last LiS work for a while, but if you have any questions or thoughts, please visit my [tumblr](http://www.lesbianmax.tumblr.com).


End file.
